Entrepreneurial personality and entrepreneurial behaviour

• Author: Marcela Rodica Luca
• Position: Transilvania University of Brasov
• Pages: 19-28

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov

Series VII: Social Sciences • Law • Vol. 10 (59) No. 1 - 2017

ENTREPRENEURIAL PERSONALITY AND

ENTREPRENEURIAL BEHAVIOUR

Marcela Rodica LUCA1

Abstract: The paper presents a literature analysis concerning the concept

of entrepreneurial personality. Several topics are discussed, such as:

entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial personality, personality traits and factors

associated with entrepreneurship, context variables influencing

entrepreneurial behaviour, psychological explanations of entrepreneurial

behaviour.

Key words: entrepreneurial personality, personality traits, Big Five, Big

Three of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship.

1. Entrepreneurship as a Study Field

The entrepreneurial behaviour has been considered to be an engine of economic and

social development ever since Max Weber (1934), for whom ‘the entrepreneurial spirit’

was the direct result of the education derived from protestant ethics. Psychologists such

as McClelland (1961) or Furnham (1990) developed this idea and looked for the

determinants of entrepreneurial behaviour in the personality features modelled by

protestant ethics. In a country such as Romania, where, for five decades, people were

educated to consider entrepreneurship as a manifestation of dishonesty (the label of

‘black marketer’ was attached to the ones who tried to start what today we would call

‘small business’) under the circumstances of a society which forbade and punished such

behaviour, the entrepreneurial spirit was blamed as being capitalist, suspect and a threat

to the communist social order. After the 1989 Revolution, the mentalities started to

change with the development of the private economic sector and with the apparition of a

new social category—the businessmen.

The promotion of entrepreneurship started to be considered a priority in many

countries, including Romania, due to the fact that, as Max Weber, McClelland (1961) and

others sustained, it is a factor of economic development and a source of national wealth,

as it creates jobs in different activity sectors and includes some disadvantaged social

categories, such as different types of minorities, including women.

Entrepreneurship is relatively recent as a research domain, the first researches being

mentioned in the 70’s, present mostly in western countries, in faculties which offered

specialisations in business administration. The entrepreneurship courses were initiated,

however, long before that, after World War II (Cooper, 2005). Due to the multiplication

1 Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania, marcela.luca@unitbv.ro