Born to Be an Entrepreneur ? Revisiting the Personality Approach to Entrepreneurship

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksChapterpeer-review

Authors

The personality approach is one of the classical and early approaches to entrepreneurship. At the same time, it is one of the more controversial areas of research. The personality approach to entrepreneurship has been criticized in the entrepreneurship literature with the following arguments (Aldrich & Wiedenmayer, 1993; Brockhaus & Horwitz, 1985; Gartner, 1989; Low & MacMillan, 1988): Entrepreneurship requires too varied behaviors to be related to specific personality traits; personality traits are not strongly enough related to entrepreneurship to warrant further studies; and alternative views, such as ecological approaches, have been proposed that concentrate on environmental accounts. These arguments were quite effective and led to the dominant position in entrepreneurship research that works on personality traits should be discontinued (Low & MacMillan, 1988). Asimilar position seemed to exist for a while in organizational behavior and industrial/organizational psychology, as well: Here similar arguments on the lack of usefulness of personality prediction of performance (and leadership) were voiced (Guion & Gottier, 1965). Much of this started out with the book by Mischel (1968) arguing that results on personality constructs were limited by r = .30 to explain meaningful behaviors and that there was lack of cross-situational consistency in personality variables. However, over time, the tide changed and there is now a revival of personality research in performance and leadership research and in many other areas of industrial/organizational psychology too. There is now the consensus that there is ample evidence for the validity of certain personality variables for organization behavior (Barrick & Mount, 1991) and for leadership (Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002).
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Psychology of Entrepreneurship
EditorsJ. R. Baum, M. Frese, R. A. Baron
Number of pages25
Place of PublicationMahwah
PublisherErlbaum Publishers
Publication date2007
Edition1.
Pages41-65
ISBN (print)0-8058-5062-7, 9780805850628
ISBN (electronic)9781317613794
Publication statusPublished - 2007
Externally publishedYes

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. A temporal analysis of how entrepreneurial goal intentions, positive fantasies, and action planning affect starting a new venture and when the effects wear off.
  2. Rätselhafte Röhren in der Landschaft
  3. Inquiry-based learning in sustainability science
  4. Begriffe - Positionen - Debatten
  5. Reading the invisible hand: Providence and equilibrium in religion and economics
  6. Fate of Pesticides and Their Transformation Products
  7. What's on in Arts Marketing Research?
  8. Summer temperatures from the Middle Pleistocene site Schöningen 13 II, northern Germany, determined from subfossil chironomid assemblages
  9. When I'm sixty-four...
  10. Merkmalsüberdeterminierung und andere Artefakte bei der Beurteilung einfacher geometrischer Reize.
  11. Materialexplosion und Avantgardeanspruch
  12. Nitrogen losses from fertilizers applied to maize, wheat and rice in the North China Plain
  13. Climate – grazing interactions in Mongolian rangelands
  14. Driving anger expression in Germany—Validation of the Driving Anger Expression Inventory for German drivers
  15. Analysis of the Influence of Fibers on the Formability of Metal Blanks in Manufacturing Processes for Fiber Metal Laminates
  16. Drawing blanks and winning
  17. Sight or scent: lemur sensory reliance in detecting food quality varies with feeding ecology.
  18. Firm-Level Data
  19. Die Prinzipien des Umweltgesetzbuchs
  20. Trait emotional intelligence facilitates responses to a social gambling task
  21. „Zeit, dass sich was dreht"
  22. Global patterns of vascular plant alpha diversity
  23. Via - communis Europa