Motivations and Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs

Assignment Task

1. This first lecture of Topic 3 focuses on the motivations of different types of entrepreneur that have been identified by academics and practitioners. It then considers some of the main traits that entrepreneurs have in terms of their personalities.

2. Amit & Muller (1995) have put forward definitions of two types of entrepreneurs based on their motivation to engage in entrepreneurial activity.

3. Fairlie & Fossen and other academics and practitioners have developed the concept of different types of entrepreneur further, describing two types of entrepreneurs – those driven by necessity and those driven by opportunity.

They state: ‘Individuals who are initially unemployed before starting businesses are defined as necessity entrepreneurs, and individuals who are wage/salary workers, enrolled in school or college, or are not actively seeking a job are defined as ‘opportunity’ entrepreneurs’...

4. However, you may recall from the research task you undertook in topic 1 that the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor defines necessity-motivated entrepreneurs as having ‘no other options for work’ . This did not apply to me and I was actually offered other full-time jobs but chose to launch my own business instead...

5. Every human being is unique and attempts to pigeon-hole everyone into different types of personality is never going to be completely accurate. That said, plenty of academics and practitioners believe they have identified traits that they feel are common to being an entrepreneur.

For example, a study published by Myers-Briggs (Hackston, 2017), showed that certain personality types are likely to have more of an entrepreneurial mindset than others. They concluded that personality types they defined as ‘Intuition’ and ‘Perceiving’ had more of an entrepreneurial nature than those they deemed to have been Sensing and Judging types.

This Management has been solved by our PhD Experts at My Uni Paper.