Proactive Personality Disposition and its Effects on the Start-Up Actions of Nascent Entrepreneurs

Objectives: This work builds upon the small body of work which seeks to develop a greater understanding of the nascent entrepreneur. The nascent entrepreneur is an individual in the process of starting a business and represents an underdeveloped part of the enterprise literature. This work seeks to investigate the entrepreneur from the perspective of behavioural psychology using the Proactive Personality Scale (Bateman & Crant, 1993). Somewhat a Cinderella to cognitive psychology the behavioural school nevertheless may offer insights into this brief but fundamental entrepreneurial phase. Prior Work: This work builds on work from this author which already looks at the nascent entrepreneurial phase from a cognitive perspective. Proactive personality has been shown to have a positive correlation with business start-up intentions Crant (1996) and career success Seibert (1999). Approaches: This is an empirical study using the validated and reliable Proactive Personality Scale consists of 119 nascent entrepreneurs. These results are then compared with 138 established entrepreneurs. A number of hypotheses are developed investigating a relationship between nascent entrepreneurship, proactive personality and start-up. Results: The study identified that both nascent and established entrepreneurs displayed proactive personality scores and that there was no statistical difference between these two groups. However both groups displayed a greater proclivity towards proactive personality than a control group of non-entrepreneurs. Implications: Proactive personality seems to be a key indicator or entrepreneurial behaviour for both the nascent and established entrepreneur data set. The findings suggest that proactive personality could be a factor in a nascent entrepreneur’s decision to research, gather information and accrue knowledge when others do not. Further this could be a factor in their subsequent decision to launch a new business. Value: The decision to research this neglected field of nascent entrepreneurship and Proactive Personality means new insights have been made about the nature of the business launch decision, opportunity identification and the individuals who perform these actions. Behaviours can be learnt they can be trained and even manipulated this has implications for education, business support and workplace training. This study also opens up the possibility for an interesting juxtaposition with cognitive approaches and suggests a rich diversity of influences in the early phases of entrepreneurship.