Entrepreneurial Personality

Abstract

Entrepreneurship as a research topic has been approached from different disciplines. After justifying the importance of its study, we define it as a process of discovery, assessment, and exploitation of opportunities. As part of this process, it also becomes important to study the person behind these actions. In fact, the personality approach is one of the most classic approaches in the study of entrepreneurship, albeit at same time one of the most controversial. This chapter summarizes relevant literature on personality traits and entrepreneurship, and differences are also established between broad traits (e.g., Big Five) and more specific traits (e.g., Opportunity Recognition or Locus of Control). Due to space constraints, this chapter does not do justice to all the existing developments that have analyzed the relationship between personality traits and entrepreneurship; however, it also includes a section dedicated to cognitive ability as a line of work that can complement the trait-based approach. The authors finalize this chapter with conclusions from the selected literature.