The Psychological Profile of Tunisian SMEs Founders Amid the COVID-19 Crisis

Khaled Tamzini
Additional contact information
Khaled Tamzini: FSEG of Sousse, University of Sousse, Tunisia2LaREMFiQ Laboratory, University of Sousse, Tunisia

Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC), 2021, vol. 29, issue 04, 355-387

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to determine the psychological profile of the Tunisian SMEs founder amid the COVID-19 crisis. The results of this research demonstrated that their psychological profile in times of COVID-19 crisis is quadridimensional and that each of these four dimensions (tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, attitude towards risk, self-confidence and locus of control) are unidimensional. This research was conducted in three Tunisian industries (textiles and clothing industries, agro-food industries and industries of ceramic and glass building materials) via the administration of a questionnaire via LinkedIn (between March, 15 and May, 15 2020) to more than 400 SMEs’ founders. The critical contributions of this research are the clarification of the role of psychological factors in the field of entrepreneurship, which remains unclear, by enriching previous research on entrepreneurial personality. The main findings of this study: (1) the four key psychological traits correspond to the “specific traits†of an entrepreneur; (2) these “specific traits†are more suitable to study the profile of the SME’s founder profile at the time of crisis than the more “stable traits† — the Big Five traits; (3) the psychological profile of the SME’s founder in a hyper-turbulent environment (namely the COVID-19 crisis) correspond to the psychological entrepreneurial profile.

Keywords: Psychological profile; Founder; SMEs; Entrepreneurial profile; COVID-19 Crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218495821500205
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:wsi:jecxxx:v:29:y:2021:i:04:n:s0218495821500205

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0218495821500205

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC) is currently edited by Teck-Meng Tan

More articles in Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().