Let's put the person back into entrepreneurship research: A meta-analysis on the relationship between business owners' personality traits, business creation, and success

TLDR

Personality traits’ influence on starting and sustaining businesses is debated in entrepreneurship research. The study aims to extend prior meta‑analyses by comprehensively comparing personality traits for startup activities and success, and by matching traits to entrepreneurial tasks. The authors performed a meta‑analysis of 13,280 participants across 47 studies, comparing traits theoretically linked to entrepreneurial tasks with those not linked, for both business creation and success. Matched traits (need for achievement, self‑efficacy, innovativeness, stress tolerance, need for autonomy, proactive personality) were associated with higher effect sizes for business creation (r = .247) and success (r = .250) compared to unmatched traits, with moderate overall correlations and heterogeneity indicating the need for moderator analysis.

Abstract

Abstract The role of personality traits in the decision to start a business and to maintain it successfully is discussed controversially in entrepreneurship research. Our meta-analysis builds upon and extends earlier meta-analyses by doing a full analysis of personality traits that includes a comparison of different traits from a theoretical perspective and by analysing a full set of personality predictors for both start-up activities as well as success. Theoretically, our article adds to the literature by matching traits to the tasks of entrepreneurs. The results indicate that traits matched to the task of running a business produced higher effect sizes with business creation than traits that were not matched to the task of running an enterprise, corrected r = .247, K = 47, N = 13,280, and corrected r = .124, K = 20, N = 3975, respectively. Moreover, traits matched to the task produced higher correlations with success, corrected r = .250, K = 42, N = 5607, than traits not matched to the task of running a business, corrected r = .028, K = 13, N = 2777. The traits matched to entrepreneurship significantly correlated with entrepreneurial behaviour (business creation, business success) were need for achievement, generalized self-efficacy, innovativeness, stress tolerance, need for autonomy, and proactive personality. These relationships were of moderate size in general and, moreover, heterogeneity suggested that future research should analyse moderator variables. Notes 1Internal locus of control was included 50 times in the literature reviewed here and risk taking 35 times.