Personality Characteristics of Self-Employed; An Empirical Study

Sjoerd Beugelsdijk () and Niels Noorderhaven ()

Small Business Economics, 2005, vol. 24, issue 2, 159-167

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the personality characteristics of self-employed. Most existing studies on personality characteristics of entrepreneurs concentrate on factors like age, educational profile, and motivations to become self-employed. There is a lack of significant empirical findings to claim that entrepreneurs are psychologically different from the general population. Based on a large sample of 14,846 individuals, we compare self-employed with the general population and with wage- and salary earners. We empirically show that entrepreneurs differ from the general population and wage- and salary earners in a number of characteristics. Entrepreneurs are more individually oriented than the rest of the population. Individual responsibility and effort are distinguishing characteristics. When asked about important qualities that children can be encouraged to learn at home, entrepreneurs answer that it is important to teach children an ethic of working hard. Except for the latter characteristic, the same holds if we compare self-employed with wage- and salary earners. Copyright Springer 2005

Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11187-003-3806-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:24:y:2005:i:2:p:159-167

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-003-3806-3

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().