Leadership styles and mediation of self-efficacy in the social entrepreneurial intention of young university students

The styles of leadership are a referent of the organizational climate and of the intention of starting social entrepreneurships that contribute to sustainable development in times of pandemic and post-pandemic of the Covid-19. The purpose of this article was to analyze the explanatory capacity of transformational, transactional and passive or laissez-faire leadership styles, and the mediation that exerts the self-efficacy in the social entrepreneurial intention of university students of the University of Cuenca, Ecuador. The applied methodology corresponds to an exploratory factor analysis, the estimation of a multiple linear regression, a confirmatory factor analysis, and a structural equation model. The representative sample size was 856 university students. Moreover, of the three leadership styles analyzed, the results show that transformational leadership positively affects the social entrepreneurial intention variable of university students at the University of Cuenca, this means that they are motivated to create or develop initiatives for social entrepreneurship; and, self-efficacy, as a mediating variable, improves the explanatory relationship between both variables. These findings indicate the importance of generating transformative leaderships from the academy, as well as for generating knowledge in entrepreneurship and potentiate self-efficacy when developing and starting new or future socials entrepreneurships.