Emotional engagement as a mediator in design thinking-based entrepreneurship education: a control-value theory perspective on innovation and interpersonal competency.

Introduction: Design Thinking (DT) has been increasingly adopted in entrepreneurship education (EE), yet the psychological mechanisms through which DT contributes to entrepreneurial competency development remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on Control-Value Theory (CVT) as an interpretive framework, this study examines whether and how affective processes are associated with the development of entrepreneurial competencies in a quasi-experimental educational context. Methods: A pre-test/post-test design with non-randomly assigned intact classes was employed with 198 undergraduate students (a predominantly female, second-year cohort) from a Chinese university; the same instructor taught both the Design Thinking Teaching Method (DTTM) and Conventional Teaching Method (CTM) groups (a within-instructor design), and pre-test scores were included as covariates. Using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), the study investigated the role of Affective Attitude (AC) as a potential mediator linking DT pedagogy with Innovation Competency (INC) and Interpersonal Competency (IC). Results: The results showed that DT was significantly associated with higher AC compared with conventional instruction. Furthermore, AC fully mediated the relationship between DT and INC, suggesting that affective engagement may represent an important pathway through which DT relates to INC development. For IC, the findings revealed an exploratory competitive mediation pattern, in which DT was associated with a negative direct effect on IC alongside a positive indirect association through AC. Given that IC was measured using a two-item scale and cultural orientations were not directly assessed, this pattern should be interpreted cautiously as a tentative finding rather than a confirmed mechanism. Discussion: The study contributes to EE research by providing a CVT-informed explanation of how affective processes may accompany competency development in DT-based learning environments, moving beyond simple outcome comparisons. The findings highlight the importance of considering students' emotional engagement when designing experiential EE and suggest that future research should directly measure control and value appraisals to further test the proposed CVT-based mechanism.