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Despite the merit of extant studies on career decision regrets, they are not well integrated, are developed at different speeds and differ in focus. Specifically, they do not address an important question about the levels and antecedents of regret arising from choosing entrepreneurship instead of paid employment and vice versa. The authors adopted the regret regulation theory as foundation to examining the moderated effect of entrepreneurial potential (EP) on career choice regret (CCR) among employees and entrepreneurs.

The authors surveyed 721 employees and 724 entrepreneurs from a developing country and applied partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to test the hypotheses.

Employees regretted their career choice three times more when compared with entrepreneurs. However, the authors failed to conclude that the latter had three times better living conditions when compared with the former. EP negatively influenced the regret of being an entrepreneur in lieu of an employee while it positively influenced the regret of being an employee in lieu of an entrepreneur. The perceived opportunity cost of being a higher EP employee was three times greater when compared with that of being a lower EP entrepreneur. The effect of EP on CCR was mitigated or amplified by duration in the career, former career status, decision justifiability, and perceived environment's supportiveness.

The design was cross-sectional, thus, the findings cannot be interpreted in the strict sense of causality.

The authors rely on an important yet often overlooked context of the choice between entrepreneurship and paid employment to test, clarify, and extend the regret regulation theory. The findings have novel human resource management and entrepreneurship policy implications.

As good as existing measurements of entrepreneurial potential (EP) may appear in the literature, they are fragmented, suffer from the lack of theory integration and clarity, are inadequately specified and assessed and the dimensions are unordered by importance. These limitations of EP metrics have hindered entrepreneurial practice and theory advancement. There is a risk of atomistic evolution of the topic among “siloed” scholars and room for repetitions without real progress. The purpose of this paper was to take stock of existing measurements from which the authors developed a new instrument that is brief and inclusive.

The authors followed several steps to develop and validate the new instrument, including construct domain name specification, literature review, structured interviews with entrepreneurs, face validation by experts, semantic validation and statistical validation after two waves of data collected on employee and entrepreneur samples.

A clear operational definition of EP is proposed and serves as a starting point towards a unified EP theory. The new EP instrument is made up of 34 items classified into seven dimensions, which in order of importance are proactive innovativeness, management skill, calculated risk-taking, social skill, financial literacy, entrepreneurial competencies prone to cognitive and heuristic biases and bricolage. The authors provide evidence for reliability and validity of the new instrument.

Although a model is not the model, the authors discuss several ways in which the new measurement model can be used by different stakeholders to promote entrepreneurship.

The authors discuss the domain representativeness of the new scale and argue that the literature can meaningfully benefit from a non-fuzzy approach to what makes the EP of an individual. By developing a new EP instrument, the authors set an important pre-condition for advancing entrepreneurial theory and practice.

Entrepreneurship is important for economic growth, through its role in the provision of employment. In the recent past, a number of African universities have developed entrepreneurship education courses to facilitate the growing demand for entrepreneurs in the market. An immediate outcome anticipated from entrepreneurship education is to increase entrepreneurial intention (EI) among the participants. Unfortunately, most of the entrepreneurship education in developing economies has not been linked to an increase in the EI of students. This paper thus proposes that it is when students possess high levels of psychological capital and perceive positive social norms that entrepreneurship education will lead to positive EI. The purpose of this paper is to establish the relationship between perceived social norms (PSN), psychological capital and EI of university students.

Quantitative data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire on a random sample of 196 final year entrepreneurship and business management students, from three universities in Bukavu (East of DRC). Structural equation modeling was used to test the research hypotheses.

The paper provides four main findings. First, PSN and psychological capital have a positive significant effect on EI. Second, PSN contribute more to this effect than psychological capital. Third, PSN make a positive and significant effect on psychological capital. Lastly, psychological capital positively mediates the relationship between PSN and EI.

This study could have benefited from a qualitative approach to have a more in-depth explanation of these relationships. The study is conducted amongst students who operate in a controlled environment. This may not reflect the actual behavior of entrepreneurs.

This work provides cues of what entrepreneurship educators should consider as they recruit and train students. Specifically, the study highlights the importance of students’ psychological capital and positive social norms in transforming entrepreneurial education into intention.

This study adds value to knowledge by highlighting the mediating role of psychological capital on the relationship between PSN and EI.