Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs:
A Review of Recent Literature by Sari Pekkala Kerr William R. Kerr Tina Xu
Abstract:
We review the
extensive literature since 2000 on the personality traits of entrepreneurs. We
first consider baseline personality traits like the Big-5 model, self-efficacy
and innovativeness, locus of control, and the need for achievement. We then
consider risk attitudes and goals and aspirations of entrepreneurs. Within each
area, we separate studies by the type of entrepreneurial behavior considered:
entry into entrepreneurship, performance outcomes, and exit from
entrepreneurship. This literature shows common results and many points of
disagreement, reflective of the heterogeneous nature of entrepreneurship. We
label studies by the type of entrepreneurial population studied (e.g., Main
Street vs. those backed by venture capital) to identify interesting and
irreducible parts of this heterogeneity, while also identifying places where we
anticipate future large-scale research and the growing depth of the field are
likely to clarify matters. There are many areas, like how firm performance
connects to entrepreneurial personality, that are woefully understudied and
ripe for major advances if the appropriate cross-disciplinary ingredients are
assembled.
Conclusion
The topic of personality/psychological traits of
entrepreneurs is of great importance for the study of entrepreneurship in a
multitude of contexts, including the examination of the determinants of
occupational choice (entrepreneurship vs. paid employment), the predictors of
entrepreneurial success, the evaluation of the effects of entrepreneurship policies,
and the design and assessment of different approaches to entrepreneurship
education. While many theories and empirical analyses have approached the
concept, the literature remains arguably underdeveloped due to the conceptual
and empirical challenges faced by researchers. Our review and assessment of
recent work is built with an eye to catching up on the recent literature and
the outline of future opportunities for applied researchers.
Entrepreneurs are a very heterogeneous bunch, and so it
is not surprising that studies of their personalities are mixed. This review
highlights places where empirical findings are consistent, while also embracing
the heterogeneity where it is evident. Some of this variance appears due to
small sample sizes and selected subgroups, and so bigger studies and
meta-analyses will likely yield a clearer picture in the long-term. The
multi-disciplinary nature of the entrepreneurial characteristics and
personality literature also means that the terminology is not well standardized,
and the research dialogue does not easily lend itself to learning from past
research and making incremental progress as a field. The sheer number of
journals publishing research related to entrepreneurial characteristics, as
well as the large differences across them in terms of academic field and
quality, also complicates the ability to have a linear, chronologically
progressive research dialogue. This challenge too is likely to diminish with
time, as the greater depth and specialization of the emerging field begins to
provide returns to scale.
Other heterogeneity will be irreducible as it pertains
to the type of venture created, and we have no reason to think the geeky
personality of a 20-something tech founder will be tightly aligned with that of
a 50-something immigrant founder that is opening a Main Street convenience
store with her family members. We should, however, start to build the necessary
language and taxonomy to better label these studies and their subpopulations,
using the heterogeneity to our advantage. Accurate portraits of this
heterogeneity will, in the long-term, prove truly valuable to understanding
entrepreneurship: the differences between our two hypothetical founders above
and their businesses can be every bit as informative as the comparison of them
to people engaged in wage work. Our opinion is that future work in this regard
is likely to be more productive than a one-size-fits-all portrait of the
entrepreneur.
We believe a productive path forward exists utilizing
universal administrative datasets that characterize new firm creation and
identify the founders of ventures. These data allow researchers to model
directly the heterogeneous types of firms created, ranging from self-employed
nannies to VC-backed startups, and to measure performance and venture success
in objective ways. Moreover, the data provide insight into the careers that
founders have before starting their companies, ranging from past business
success/failure to the peers who they work with, and they describe the founding
team that comes together. Powerful tools are also capturing digital signals
about the growth intentions of founders when they set out (e.g., Guzman and
Stern, 2017). These data are already being matched with additional
personal-level information ranging from stock portfolios to personality
assessments.
It has been 30 years since the critique of Gartner
(1988), and perhaps the next 30 years will also be unkind to progress on
personality traits for entrepreneurship. Yet, the economics literature holds
such a deep focus on the creation of ventures—the “doing” in Gartner’s
critique—that it may miss fruitful opportunities to learn from personality
studies and contribute to them. Administrative data already afford much
potential in terms of empirical assessment, and more data are continually
coming online. Studies can combine these high-quality employer-employee filings
with insight on personality traits that are measured before entrepreneurial
spells commence, which would be an important first step for observing which
traits are exogenous predictors versus endogenous outcomes. In more specialized
settings, it may even be possible to build time-varying measures of personality
traits by looking before and after interventions like enrollment in an
entrepreneurial training program. It is hard to envision a setting where one
will obtain widespread and exogenous variation in personality, but substantial
progress can be made with pre-determined traits only.
This survey has repeatedly surfaced gaps between the
theory of personality traits and how we can measure them, with our empirical
tools frequently falling short of being able to disentangle complex and
overlapping psychological traits to assign causal roles. Significant
opportunities and challenges for research on entrepreneurial traits lie in
developing theoretical approaches and constructs that can be empirically
measured in a way that allows for the determination of causality between
psychological traits and entrepreneurial outcomes. The literature is often
unclear as to whether individuals with a given set of personality traits
selected into entrepreneurship, or whether individuals developed the traits
endogenously after becoming entrepreneurs. The increasing availability of
detailed longitudinal information on demographic characteristics of
entrepreneurs, including their human and financial capital endowments, as well
as on entrepreneurial environments (regions and ecosystems) provides an
opportunity to reduce both heterogeneity and endogeneity in studies of entrepreneurial
traits. This requires the development of theoretical constructs and measurement
procedures that align with detailed longitudinal coverage of people, but this
task seems promising.
FOR THE FULL ARTICLE AND REFERENCES GO TO
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/18-047_b0074a64-5428-479b-8c83-16f2a0e97eb6.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment