An analysis of data from a 17-year longitudinal study conducted in Belgium found a subtle link between extraversion in childhood and adolescence and entrepreneurial intentions in young adulthood. In other words, when extraverted children and adolescents grow up, they are slightly more likely to want to start a business compared to their less extraverted peers. The research was published in Applied Psychology.
Entrepreneurship is the process of designing, launching, and running a new business by someone who identifies a market need and develops a product or service to meet that need. Entrepreneurs are individuals who take on financial risks and uncertainties of starting and managing new ventures in hopes of making a profit and driving innovation. Entrepreneurs drive economic growth by creating new businesses, which leads to job creation and increased employment opportunities. They stimulate innovation by developing new products, services, and technologies.
Entrepreneurs contribute to competition in the marketplace, which can lead to better products and services at lower prices for consumers. They play a key role in wealth generation and distribution, often leading to increased investments in different sectors of the economy. Entrepreneurs can bring about social change by addressing gaps in the market with socially responsible and sustainable business practices. They can inspire others to pursue their own business ideas, fostering a culture of creativity and ambition.
All of these reasons make entrepreneurs crucial for the development and success of every society. Study author Annelot Wismans and her colleagues wanted to explore whether specific personality traits in childhood make it more likely that a person will desire to become an entrepreneur as an adult. They note that previous studies proposed the concept of the entrepreneurial personality profile. Individuals with this profile were those exhibiting the highest possible scores on personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, along with the lowest possible scores on the traits of agreeableness and neuroticism.
The authors of this study wanted to know whether these traits measured in childhood and young adolescence really predict entrepreneurial intentions in adulthood. In other words, they wanted to know whether children and adolescents with an entrepreneurial personality profile would be more likely to show a desire to start their own business when they became young adults.
The study authors analyzed data from FSPPD, a longitudinal Belgian study that started in 1999. It included 684 families that had Belgian nationality and were Flemish speaking. The study followed these families for 17 years, with seven data collection waves until the time of the analysis for this study.
The study authors used data from five different data collection periods ranging from when participating children were 6-9 years old (in 2001) until they were 23-26 years old (in 2018). The study participants’ parents completed an assessment of their children’s personality (the Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children). The authors used these data to calculate the similarity of the children’s/adolescents’ personality profiles to the entrepreneurial personality profile.
Entrepreneurial intention was assessed at the last data collection point (in 2018), when participants who joined the study as children were already young adults (e.g., “I am ready to do anything to be an entrepreneur,” “My professional goal is to become an entrepreneur,” “I will make every effort to start and run my own firm”).
Results showed no association between personality traits at ages 6-9 and entrepreneurial intention in adulthood. Children who showed lower levels of benevolence at 9-12 years of age were slightly more likely to show entrepreneurial intentions as young adults. Participants scoring higher on extraversion at age 12-15 tended to show slightly higher levels of entrepreneurial intention as young adults. This association became stronger when calculated with extraversion at age 14-17.
Male participants tended to show stronger entrepreneurial intentions. When other personality traits were controlled for, the link between extraversion and entrepreneurial intent in young adulthood became detectable already at 9-12 years.
“Our data show that from a young age, extraversion is important for the emergence of entrepreneurial intentions at a later age, thus supporting previous findings that have linked extraversion, BAS sensitivity (behavior activation system sensitivity, the degree to which an individual is responsive to reward stimuli, driving them toward goal-directed behaviors], and positive affect with entrepreneurship. In contrast to previous studies, we did not find relationships between the other Big Five traits and entrepreneurial intention,” the study authors concluded.
The study sheds light on the link between personality traits in childhood and entrepreneurial intentions in adulthood. However, it should be noted that the detected associations were all very weak and detectable only because the study included a large number of children/participants. Additionally, wanting to become an entrepreneur is not the same as becoming one.
The paper, “Seeking the roots of entrepreneurship: Childhood and adolescence extraversion predict entrepreneurial intention in adults,” was authored by Annelot Wismans, Pauline Jansen, Roy Thurik, Peter Prinzie, and Ingmar Franken.