The Proactive Personality Scale as a Predictor of Entrepreneurial Intentions

In a review of trends in the entrepreneurship literature, Gartner (1990) identified eight themes characterizing the major issues of entrepreneurship. One of these themes focused on the entrepreneur as an individual, and the notion that entrepreneurship involves individuals with unique personality characteristics and abilities. Within this domain of research, five attributes have consistently been found to covary with entrepreneurship: need for achievement, locus of control, risk-taking propensity, tolerance for ambiguity, and Type-A behavior (Brockhaus 1982; Brockhaus and Horwitz 1986; Furnham 1992). Despite these findings, a number of scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with extant knowledge of the personality-entrepreneurship relationship. Chell, Haworth, and Brearley (1991) suggested that disagreement on the meaning of "entrepreneurship" has impeded research progress; moreover, these authors advocated using trait terms which describe natural categories accessible to lay persons. Gartner (1988) noted that theoretical models seeking to explain the broad phenomenon of entrepreneurship would benefit by including variables beyond traits alone. Robinson et al. (1991) argued for more dynamic models of the entrepreneurship process. Shaver and Scott (1991) identified the methodological weaknesses of much entrepreneurial trait research (including the research that generated the attributes listed above) and argued for consistency between the specificity of measures and underlying constructs. Perhaps as a result of criticisms such as these, recently little research has been published examining the relationship between personality traits and entrepreneurship. Considerable attention has been devoted to creating ambitious models of various entrepreneurial processes, such as new venture initiation (Herron and Sapienza 1992), entrepreneurial potential (Krueger and Brazeal 1994), and entrepreneurial motivation (Naffziger, Hornsby, and Kuratko 1994). These conceptual frameworks have significantly enhanced the precision of theory surrounding the entrepreneurship process. However, the death knell for the study of personality and entrepreneurship may have sounded prematurely. The proactive personality scale, a recent addition to the literature on individual differences, appears to have the potential for providing further insight into the personality trait-entrepreneurship relationship. The proactive personality scale measures a personal disposition toward proactive behavior, an idea that intuitively appears to be related to entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the extent to which having a proactive personality is associated with entrepreneurial intentions. Because a common definition of entrepreneurship is lacking, it is incumbent upon researchers to define explicitly the meaning they ascribe to the term (Gartner 1989; 1990). The central variable in this paper, entrepreneurial intentions, will be defined as one's judgements about the likelihood of owning one's own business. For the research questions in this paper, differences in specific tactics and themes of entrepreneurship (for example, creating a new venture vs. buying an existing business) will not be explored. Defining entrepreneurial intentions broadly is consistent with the objectives of this research in that it avoids delimiting subjects' expression of entrepreneurial intentions. The study of behavioral intentions has a rich history in psychology (for example, Ajzen and Fishbein 1980), and has begun to appear in both conceptual (Bird 1988; Katz and Gartner 1988; Krueger and Brazeal 1994) and empirical (Brenner, Pringle, and Greenhaus 1991; Krueger 1993a; 1993b; Scott and Twomey 1988) entrepreneurship research. Krueger (1993b) argued that entrepreneurial intentions are central to understanding the entrepreneurship process because they form the underpinnings of new organizations. Because entrepreneurship occurs over time (Gartner et al. …