Authors : Shaharuddin Ahmad, Khaidzir Ismail, Jumali Selamat, Kadir Arifin, Kadaruddin Aiyub, Azahan Awang, Mohd Fuad Mat. Jali, Z.M. Lukman and A. Khairul
Abstract: One of the important soft skills that have always been stressed by the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education for the university students to acquire during their university’s life is entrepreneurship skill. This soft skill should be an added value to students’ academic qualification once they leave university to face the real world. However, there are many factors that can be obstacles to students to acquire this soft skill such as shyness, social environment, academic stress, etc. It is therefore, this study attempts to examine to what extent factors such as shyness, social, artistic and self-esteem have influence on students’ involvement in entrepreneurship. There were 2,284 1st year students of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) have been chosen as respondents and each of them was provided with a set of questionnaire consisting of seven domains to be answered. SPSS program was used to process the data and then by the path model was employed to analyze the data. The path coefficients were computed by using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results showed that the most influential factor on students’ entrepreneurial activities was social behavior with the path coefficient of 0.35. Even though, shyness has a small negative path coefficient, i.e., -0.08, it agreed with the assumption that by reducing this students’ personality trait, it will increases the involvement of them in entrepreneurial activities. Based on the residuals (e) of the regressions and other statistical tests, it is confirmed that other unexplained variables should be considered in an attempt to find the most influential factors on students’ involvement in entrepreneurial activities.
Shaharuddin Ahmad, Khaidzir Ismail, Jumali Selamat, Kadir Arifin, Kadaruddin Aiyub, Azahan Awang, Mohd Fuad Mat. Jali, Z.M. Lukman and A. Khairul, 2012. Entrepreneurship and Shyness Attitudes of First Year Students at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM): A Path Analysis Model. The Social Sciences, 7: 424-430.