Personality aspects of entrepreneurship: A look at five meta-analyses

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Abstract

Research on personality aspects of entrepreneurship, recently summarized in five meta-analyses, has intensified during the past two decades. Internationally, entrepreneurship has been recognized as highly important for socio-economic prosperity. After discussing a few basic concepts relating task and context of entrepreneurship to personality characteristics the main results of the meta-analyses are reported. In the system of the Big Five, personality traits make a difference when entrepreneurs are compared with managers (C+, O+, E+, N−, A−). They are also relevant in predicting entrepreneurial intention (C+, O+, N−, E+) and entrepreneurs’ performance (C+, O+, E+, N−). For other more specific scales that have frequently enough been used and could therefore be included in meta-analyses (e.g., readiness for innovation, proactive personality, generalized self-efficacy, stress tolerance, need for autonomy, locus of control) have also been reported significant correlations with business creation and business success. Risk propensity supports business foundation, but not necessarily business success. Achievement motivation is favourable both for business foundation and business success. The effect sizes are mostly small, some moderate. Complementing the results of the meta-analyses, some recent single studies on mediator or moderator effects are briefly reviewed.

Introduction

During the past two decades entrepreneurship has become a very active field of research in various social science disciplines and a prominent concern of economic policy. Adaptation of economic systems to changing conditions, innovation of products and services, creation of jobs, and economic growth is assumed to be very much dependent on the readiness and willingness of people to start an independent privately owned business and on the founders’ skills and efforts to run it successfully (cf. Böheim et al., 2009, Erken et al., 2008, Van Praag and Versloot, 2007). This is particularly true in the field of new technology where entrepreneurial activities demand a high level of knowledge in applying research and development (R & D) and high creativity in taking advantage of market niches.

Decades after Schumpeter (1912/1988) convincingly pointed to the importance of the entrepreneur for economic development, looking for personality traits uniquely characteristic of entrepreneurs was occasionally the topic of research, albeit one with rather modest success. Consequently, in the 1970s and 1980s the personality approach to studying entrepreneurial behaviour was discredited (e.g., Gartner, 1989). However, it gained new momentum in the 1990s, which according to Zhao and Seibert (2006) probably reflected the increasing acceptance of the unifying five-factor model (FFM) of personality and meta-analysis as technique for aggregating and generalizing the results of many single studies. Concurrently, the interest in, and appreciation of, the psychological sub-discipline of personality research has very much changed for the better.

Most of the studies published during the past two decades have already been reviewed in previous meta-analyses (Rauch and Frese, 2007, Stewart and Roth, 2001, Zhao and Seibert, 2006, Zhao et al., 2010, on personality including risk propensity; Collins et al., 2004, Stewart and Roth, 2007, on achievement motivation). Thus, the present paper focuses on these meta-analyses in a form of intuitive meta-synthesis (Sipe & Curlette, 1997) as an attempt to integrate their results in the light of the FFM as reference system for personality traits. Single studies will be reviewed only when their design or their results are of special interest – this will be because they reveal mediator and/or moderator effects in the influence of personality traits on entrepreneurial behaviour that are not frequently enough encountered and are, therefore, not reported as average effects in meta-analyses.

Meta-analyses are commonly designed not to test hypotheses but to explore a field of research for congruence or heterogeneity of the results of many single studies reported in the literature. Therefore, it seems neither necessary nor reasonable to explicate in advance theoretical expectations about the effects of personality traits on entrepreneurial behaviour. Theoretical implications and interpretations of the results of the meta-analyses will be discussed later.

That personality has some influence at all should be evident from basic characteristics of the entrepreneurial role: initiating a life of self-determination and independence (Emotional Stability), finding new opportunities and ways of structuring and developing the enterprise (Openness to experience), hard working and persistent in goal striving (achievement motivation component of Conscientiousness), establishing a social network (Extraversion), and taking the risk of failure (risk propensity, possibly a combination of Emotional Stability, Openness, and Extraversion).

After clarifying definitions of entrepreneurship and personality traits each of five meta-analyses are reported with their main results, summarized, integrated, and complemented by exemplary studies of mediating and moderating effects. This should contribute to a base of knowledge from which future research can start thinking about unresolved problems, necessary changes in research strategies, and promising theoretical and methodological approaches.

Section snippets

The concept of entrepreneurship

Eckhardt and Shane (2003, p. 336) define entrepreneurship “… as the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of future goods and services … [by] … creation or identification of new ends and means previously undetected or unutilized by market participants”. In this perspective, entrepreneurship could be an attribute of managers as well as of business founders, and founding a small private enterprise may not be an entrepreneurial activity per se, but only if it is clearly characterized by novelty

Risk propensity of entrepreneurs and managers (Stewart & Roth, 2001)

The first in the series of meta-analyses on entrepreneurs’ personality traits performed during the last 10 years is that of Stewart and Roth (2001), which included 12 studies (six using the risk scale of the Jackson Personality Inventory, four the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire, two some other scales). They compared risk propensity between entrepreneurs and managers. Contrasting entrepreneurs with managers makes sense if other conditions such as gender, education level, professional experience,

Summarizing and integrating the results of the five meta-analyses

Most attention has been attracted by temperament traits (or personality traits in the narrow sense), as represented by the five-factor model, or by traits that can be located within the FFM-system as equivalent to one of the five factors (Zhao and Seibert, 2006, Zhao et al., 2010), or as equivalent to a weighted composite of several FFM-dimensions. Examples of the latter are proactive personality and innovativeness among the traits dealt with in the meta-analysis of Rauch and Frese (2007).

Variables mediating the personality trait effects

Whereas the meta-analysis approach is quite efficient in detecting, summarizing, and reporting personality main effects, it is less apt in dealing with mediating and moderating effects, mainly because the number of studies reporting such effects is often not large enough to allow a reliable estimation of means and error variances of the effects across studies. It seems, therefore, advisable to pay special attention to some single studies that report theoretically interesting and practically

Conclusions

Analyzing the tasks of entrepreneurs is an indispensable first step in entrepreneurial research. These tasks vary with circumstances such as the type of industry (providing service or material goods, based on new technology or conventional techniques), region, competitors, social networks, founding a business as a matter of necessity or opportunity, financial resources, developmental stage of the business. But techniques for systematic analyses of entrepreneurial tasks under various

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