What entrepreneurs can do — and what they feel they must do — is deeply rooted in personality.
Entrepreneurs are cut from a different cloth, and there are more of them than ever. News cycles regularly feature the latest startup that has been funded and sent to the market.
Gig workers, freelancers, consultants, analysts and more have been given a huge advantage as remote work becomes normal and widely accepted. This means that entrepreneurs may have more opportunities than ever to give life to their big ideas.
Because of the increased prevalence of new and innovative businesses, many experts and forecasters are revisiting research from the past decade about entrepreneurial personalities.
Entrepreneurial personality traits
The Harvard Business School has a working paper called “Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs.” In it, the three authors review literature about the personality traits of entrepreneurs, first considering the Big 5 Model of human motivation as well as risk attitudes, goals, aspirations, locus of control and the need for achievement.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who start new businesses share a lot of common characteristics.
These characteristics follow three core themes, sometimes taken together as an “entrepreneurial orientation”: distinct personality traits, including self-efficacy and innovativeness; a unique attitude toward risk, which may be misinterpreted as overconfidence; and shared goals and aspirations.
The authors of that paper draw a line of difference between entrepreneurs and managers. Entrepreneurs are not just great leaders or capable administrators: They deviate from common leadership patterns.
Researchers found that entrepreneurs were more conscientious, similarly extroverted and more agreeable than managers. Entrepreneurs are consistently more open to experience, changing environments and new challenges than managers, and they're also extremely achievement-oriented, but are drawn to environments where success is attributed to their efforts, rather than an institution.
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