Abstract:
The main purpose of this study was to design entrepreneurship extension model for creating employment in agricultural production cooperatives. The research was quantitative and conducted based on descriptive method. The instruments of the study were questionnaire that was developed by researchers and their validity was confirmed by a panel of experts. The reliability was obtained by using Cronbach's Alpha coefficient test and was measured for two questionnaires as 0.83 and 0.78. The statistical population of the study consists of managers of agricultural production cooperatives in Iran and the experts within the Ministry of Cooperative. The sample size was 250 and they were selected through stratified sampling. The data were analyzed by SPSS and LISRAL software. The result of the spearman correlation coefficient showed that there was meaningful and positive relationship between perception of respondents about psychological, educational and managerial factors and job creation in agricultural production cooperatives. The result of collective effect of independent variables on dependent variable "number of small firms" with multi dimensional regression showed that the economical, educational and psychological factors had positive effect on "number of small firms" and the personal characteristics and political factors had negative effect on "number of small firms". Based on the perception of the respondents and ordinal factor analysis, the factors were categorized into eight groups, namely psychological/cognitive, education, economical, organizational, financial, personal characteristics, regulatory, and social, ordered by the magnitude of their impact.

Key words: entrepreneurship, extension entrepreneurship, collective entrepreneurship, agricultural production cooperatives, employment creation.