The effect of networking behavior on entrepreneurial intention

Entrepreneurship has attracted the attention of scientists in every period of history due to its important role in economic development. When we look at the basic features that entrepreneurs should have, there are various definitions made by scientists in historical development. In general, we can define entrepreneur as the person who takes risks, sees opportunities and gathers resources. Entrepreneur must have various skills in order to carry out his/her activities successfully. Those are technical, managerial and entrepreneurial skills. It can be stated that entrepreneur's networking behavior have a significant effect on those skills. Networking behavior, which thought to have an important role in the development of individuals' careers and entrepreneurial skills, have two facet as structural and functional facet. When we evaluate from the structural facet, networking behavior distinguishes contacts within and outside an individual's organization, that is, internal and external networking. On the other hand, functional facet reflects the prototypical process of relationship development and distinguishes between building, maintaining and using contacts. Crossing the two facets yields six types of networking behaviors; building internal contacts, maintaining internal contacts, using internal contacts, building external contacts, maintaining external contacts and using external contacts. In this study, the relationship between entrepreneurial intention and networking behavior is investigated on students, who are considered as potential entrepreneurs, that have completed their undergraduate studies in various fields and attending to a graduate program at Istanbul University, School of Business. In accordance with the answers of 332 students participated in this research, it was determined that building internal network and building external network had a significant effect on entrepreneurial intention.