Unravelling Voluntary Student Participation: Empowerment and Engagement as Driving Forces

Fostering voluntary participation in compulsory marketing courses is critical for developing students’ analytical, creative, and collaborative competencies, yet it remains challenging when students perceive marketing as less rigorous. While empowerment and engagement are recognized as critical drivers of participation, research has treated these constructs independently. This study addresses this gap by investigating their joint effects. Using a concurrent mixed-methods design incorporating interviews, classroom observations, and a survey of 319 business students, we provide the first empirical evidence that, in marketing education, empowerment drives voluntary participation exclusively through engagement (indirect effect β = 0.44, p < 0.001). Qualitative findings reveal that psychological safety and extracurricular experiences operate as critical contextual conditions that reinforce this mechanism. These findings advance marketing education theory and offer a practical framework that guides marketing educators in designing relevance-rich activities, providing structured autonomy, amplifying student voice, and cultivating psychologically safe environments to strengthen empowerment and sustain voluntary participation.