Impact of entrepreneurial camp on students’ psychological capital

Abstract

Psychological capital is a positive quality that describes person’s attitudes towards work and life in general. It includes four dimensions: self-efficacy, optimism, hope and resilience. There are plenty of research of positive impact of psychological capital on individuals’ working life, and research show that short interventions impact positively into the psychological capital dimensions. Here the interest was to see if the intensive 3-weeks innovation and entrepreneurial camp impacts on the students’ psychological capital. 95 participants did answer on the questionnaire during the last week of the camp. Results indicated that impact of the camp was positive in all the psychological capital dimensions. The dimension Hope increased mostly, indicating that camp impacted positively on attitudes for target setting and finding the different paths to gain those. The dimension Resilience did not increase so much, which may be because the students were quite tired at the end phase of the camp. Interestingly those students who had intentions to start own business, had more increase of psychological capital than those who were unsure about their intentions of becoming entrepreneur. Also, students from US reported more increase in their psychological capital than European students.