An analysis of data from a 17-year longitudinal study conducted in Belgium found a subtle association between extroversion in childhood and adolescence and entrepreneurial aspirations in adolescence. In other words, extroverted children and adolescents are slightly more likely to want to start their own businesses when they grow up than their less extroverted peers. The study Applied Psychology.
Entrepreneurship is the process in which a new business is designed, launched, and operated by a person who identifies a need in a market and develops a product or service to meet that need. An entrepreneur is an individual who takes on the financial risks and uncertainties of starting and managing a new venture in the hopes of making a profit and driving innovation. Entrepreneurs drive economic growth by creating new businesses, which in turn leads to job creation and increased employment opportunities. Entrepreneurs stimulate innovation by developing new products, services, and technologies.
Entrepreneurs contribute to competition in the marketplace, resulting in better products and services at lower prices for consumers. Entrepreneurs play a key role in wealth creation and distribution, often leading to increased investment in various sectors of the economy. Entrepreneurs can bring about social change by filling gaps in the market with socially responsible and sustainable business practices. Entrepreneurs can inspire others to pursue their own business ideas, fostering a culture of creativity and ambition.
For all these reasons, entrepreneurs are essential to the development and success of any society. Study author Annelotte Withmans and her colleagues wanted to explore whether certain personality traits in childhood increase a person’s desire to become an entrepreneur in adulthood. They note that previous research has proposed the concept of an entrepreneurial personality profile. Individuals with this profile were those who scored highest on the personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, and lowest on the traits of agreeableness and neuroticism.
The study’s authors wanted to know whether these characteristics measured during childhood and adolescence could really predict entrepreneurial intentions in adulthood. In other words, they wanted to know whether children and adolescents with an entrepreneurial personality profile were more likely to show a desire to start their own business when they became young adults.
The study authors analyzed data from the FSPPD, a Belgian longitudinal study that began in 1999. The study included 684 families who were Belgian nationals and Flemish-speaking. The study followed these families for 17 years, with seven waves of data collection having taken place by the time of the study’s analysis.
The study authors used data from five different data collection periods, from when the children in the study were 6-9 years old (2001) to 23-26 years old (2018). The parents of the study participants completed personality assessments of their children (Children’s Hierarchical Personality Trait Inventory). The authors used these data to calculate the similarity between the personality profiles of the children/adolescents and the entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurial intentions were assessed at the last data collection point (2018), when participants who had joined the study as children were already young adults (e.g., “I am ready to do anything to become an entrepreneur”, “My professional goal is to become an entrepreneur”, “I will make every effort to start and run my own company”).
Results suggested no association between personality traits at ages 6-9 and entrepreneurial intent in adulthood. Children who had lower levels of compassion at ages 9-12 were slightly more likely to show entrepreneurial intent in young adulthood. Participants who scored higher on extraversion at ages 12-15 were more likely to have slightly higher levels of entrepreneurial intent in young adulthood. This association was even stronger when extraversion was calculated at ages 14-17.
Male participants tended to show stronger entrepreneurial intent.Taking other personality traits into account, the association between extraversion and entrepreneurial intent in young adulthood was already detectable at ages 9-12.
“Our data show that extraversion from an early age is important for the expression of entrepreneurial intent at later ages and support previous findings linking extraversion, BAS sensitivity (behavioral activation system sensitivity, the degree to which an individual responds to reward stimuli, guiding them towards goal-directed behaviour), and positive affectivity with entrepreneurial intent. In contrast to previous studies, we found no relationships between the other Big Five traits and entrepreneurial intent,” the study authors conclude.
The study reveals associations between childhood personality traits and entrepreneurial intent in adulthood. However, it should be noted that all associations found are very weak and were only found due to the large number of children/participants included in the study. Also, wanting to be an entrepreneur is not the same as actually becoming one.
The paper, “Exploring the roots of entrepreneurialism: Childhood and adolescent extraversion predicts adult entrepreneurship,” was written by Annelot Withmans, Pauline Janssen, Roy Tulik, Peter Pringy and Ingmar Franken.
