The Impact of Business Coaching on Founder Confidence and Entrepreneurial Orientation in University Incubated Startups

Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory, this research addresses a theoretical gap concerning how environmental support mechanisms in developing-country incubators foster entrepreneurial mindsets and strategic behaviour. The study examines how business coaching within university business incubators shapes the cognitive and behavioural orientations of student founders in Indonesia by analysing its influence on locus of control, self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial orientation. Throughout, founder confidence is used as an organizing term for two conceptually distinct agentic beliefs internal locus of control and self-efficacy each modelled as a separate mediator rather than as a single latent variable. A quantitative research design was employed, involving 220 student founders whose startups were incubated in university business incubators across Indonesia. Data were collected through structured questionnaires and analysed using PLS-SEM to test both direct and mediating effects among variables. Business coaching significantly enhances founders’ locus of control, self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial orientation. Locus of control and self-efficacy each exert positive effects on entrepreneurial orientation, confirming their roles as central cognitive mechanisms underpinning entrepreneurial behaviour. Mediation analysis reveals that locus of control and self-efficacy significantly mediate the relationship between business coaching and entrepreneurial orientation, and that the indirect cognitive pathways collectively exceed the comparatively modest direct effect of coaching. These findings position coaching not merely as a technical intervention but as a psychological and developmental process that reshapes founders’ agentic cognition and strategic entrepreneurial posture within university incubation environments. The study offers novel empirical evidence on the psychological mechanisms through which business coaching influences entrepreneurial orientation in university incubators within a developing-country context a setting often overlooked in the literature.