Creation of the entrepreneurial personality scale: Removing conceptual and empirical barriers from the study of personality and entrepreneurship

Abstract

The goal of the current article is to address systematic barriers that hamper modern research on Entrepreneurial Personality (EP). We provide conceptual clarity to the meaning of EP, which we conceptualize with the dimensions of innovativeness, risk-taking propensity, achievement orientation, proactiveness, locus of control, self-efficacy, and autonomy orientation. We also formalize two competing perspectives regarding EP's relations with relevant outcomes; the Pillar Conceptualization proposes that EP produces consistent relations with relevant outcomes, whereas the Wheel Conceptualization proposes that EP produces varying relations that depend on the specific phase of the entrepreneurial process. Then, we develop the Entrepreneurial Personality Scale (EPS) using five samples (total n = 1877), which include samples of general participants and samples of solely entrepreneurs. We show that the EPS produces appropriate psychometric and validity evidence across both types of samples, strongly supporting its use in future research. We also show that the EPS dimensions produce varying relations with relevant outcomes, which were determined by the phase of the entrepreneurial process – supporting the Wheel Conceptualization. Via these efforts, future researchers can investigate EP with greater confidence in their theoretical rationale and methodological soundness by applying the EPS. The Wheel Conceptualization is also a promising lens to understand EP moving forward, and a clear future direction for research is to integrate novel temporal theories and frameworks to add nuance to this perspective.