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Earlier studies have shown that individuals with business education and the personality traits listed in the big-five model are more inclined to pursue entrepreneurial activities. The Big-Five Model of personality is one of the prominent taxonomies, which highlights five fundamental human's traits. However, the big-five model does not cover all baseline personality features essential for pursuing an entrepreneurial career. Drawing on the trait-factor theory of career choice, this study discusses action-oriented traits as a driving force for individuals to pursue entrepreneurship as a foremost career choice in the context of developing economies.

Data of 599 recent graduates, who just completed their university degrees and about to join the job market, were collected through surveys and analyzed after achieving the model-fit.

Results highlighted that three action-oriented traits (innovativeness, risk-taking and competitiveness) aspire individuals to pursue entrepreneurial careers. In addition, a multi-group analysis of business vs. non-business educational backgrounds revealed that business related education is not the only strong precursor leading to the pursuit of an entrepreneurial career.

This study draws attention to the belief of higher educational consultants, institutes and policymakers that investment in certain trait development can increase the number of new entrepreneurs in an economy.

As research emerged in terms of how narcissism, a negative or dark trait, has been found to be constructive in enhancing entrepreneurial behaviour, there are mixed results regarding the significance of narcissism in the field of entrepreneurship. Additionally, this previous research has mostly been conducted on student or nascent entrepreneur samples within developed economies. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore how narcissistic traits of established entrepreneurs in an emerging economy context infuence their entrepreneurial behaviour both positively and negatively.

Gioia methodology was applied in the qualitative study by means of in-depth interviews, which allowed for the unpacking of narcissistic traits among established entrepreneurs in South Africa. Four themes emerged from the data, and included insights related to entrepreneurial experience influencing behaviour; business growth linked to personal development; opportunity identification versus loss; and identity separation in relation to authentic identity versus an entrepreneurial identity.

The findings of the paper contribute to creating an understanding of how to hone individual narcissistic traits for positive influences that develop entrepreneurs while also contributing to their business development, opportunity realization and identity. In addition, the findings highlighted a separation between established entrepreneurs’ authentic personality and the inputs that end up resulting in the entrepreneurial personality.

This paper highlights the possibility of narcissism functioning as a business process involved in entrepreneurship rather than a necessary personality trait. An interesting dynamic contributed to what seems to be a constant battle between the authentic identity and the entrepreneur identity, gaining deeper insight surrounding established entrepreneurs’ experiences to survive and, more importantly, thrive as entrepreneurs.

According to the literature, general personality traits are less strongly related to the creation of new ventures than specific/proximal personality traits. Therefore, this study aims to understand the different proximal personalities that influence the entrepreneurial intention to start a new venture and the relationship between them.

Data were gathered through a self-administered questionnaire filled in by students of entrepreneurship or related courses at the end of the second semester (2019/2020 academic year), and the research option is based on covariance-based structural equation modelling.

The results of this study show that entrepreneurial intentions can be predicted by specific individual traits, namely, risk-taking, entrepreneurial alertness, creativity, proactivity and self-efficacy. Moreover, it was found that risk-taking mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial alertness and proactivity. On the other hand, students’ creativity mediates the relationship between risk-taking and proactivity. Finally, students’ self-efficacy mediates the relationship between proactiveness and entrepreneurial intention.

The results have implications for entrepreneurship education given that a better understanding of the personality traits that influence entrepreneurial intentions can lead to the development of new approaches and pedagogical tools.

This model can be used as a diagnostic tool for designing an effective and efficient entrepreneurship curriculum and pedagogy, acting as an (ongoing) audit of students’ entrepreneurial intentions to get a scientific basis in case of further course/module adjustments.

This study aims to empirically assess entrepreneurial leadership skills’ role in Corporate Sustainable Development (CSD) and firm performance (FP). This study considers five specific entrepreneurial traits: innovativeness, creativity, analytical thinking, emotional intelligence and passion and motivation. The motivation for this investigation stems from concerns over micro-firms vulnerabilities and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) lacking proper leadership skills. This study is guided by the resource-based view theory and conducted during the pandemic, offering insights into firms operating under constrained conditions.

Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM), were used on survey responses from 321 Bahraini firms. This study’s data collection occurred under environmental uncertainties due to the pandemic and provides a unique context for understanding CSD and entrepreneurial leadership skills under high business/environmental uncertainty.

The findings reveal that entrepreneurial leadership skills positively impact CSD and firm performance through creativity, passion and motivation. However, innovativeness negatively affects CSD and FP. Furthermore, CSD positively influences firm performance.

Theoretical and practical implications, plus limitations, are also discussed in this study.

Understanding entrepreneurial leadership skills effect on CSD and firm performance in SMEs is important as SEMs are prone to fail in the early years. This study’s findings and its implications help guide SME leaders in furthering their entrepreneurial leadership skills to foster CSD and firm performance.

This study contributes to comprehending the crucial role of entrepreneurial skills, during uncertain times of the pandemic, for SMEs’ survival. It provides valuable insights for firms operating in competitive environments, offering a unique perspective on the required entrepreneurial skills and their effect on CSD and firm performance.

Women’s involvement in business is growing and positively impacting the national economy, especially in developing countries. Women entrepreneurs’ success has shown women’s abilities to empower and support national policies and agendas. Efforts and tenacity in a consecutive e-commerce business require innumerable tactics since the business ecosystem has become more challenging and complex. Therefore, this study aims to identify the multiple mediation influence of the need for achievement and locus of control towards the relationship between entrepreneurial knowledge and women entrepreneurs’ e-commerce ventures. The theory of planned behaviour provides excellent opportunities for understanding and envisaging entrepreneurial actions. The study pre-supposes that the interaction of these variables ultimately defines women entrepreneurs’ e-commerce ventures.

This study used a cross-sectional design, and the survey data were collected from 259 valid women entrepreneurs. The study population covers the Klang Valley area, composed of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, Malaysia. The instrument used in this study was adapted from previous studies. Structural equation modelling was used to establish the measurement model and examine the direct and causal path models.

Firstly, results show a positive relationship between entrepreneurial knowledge and women entrepreneurs’ e-commerce ventures. Secondly, the results show that the need for achievement and locus of control plays an intermediate role in the relationship between entrepreneurial knowledge and women entrepreneurs’ e-commerce ventures.

There are some limitations to this study. Firstly, the main limitation is that it is impossible to generalise the study’s findings since it only examines the sample in the Klang Valley area. Therefore, it would be better for future research to conduct similar studies in other areas. Next, the data were collected cross-sectional, and considering the changes in time that might influence human behaviour, future studies might consider a longitudinal research technique. Thirdly, this study model is limited; hence, future studies can advance and develop the current research model by including more variables, such as moderating and mediating variables.

Education is one of the driving factors that help increase entrepreneurs’ knowledge and skills. Lifelong learning programs must be implemented for women entrepreneurs to increase their knowledge. The relevant parties, including the government, entrepreneurial bodies, training institutions and universities, must provide and develop a more affordable, flexible and inclusive short-course training program and activities for women entrepreneurs.

Empirical studies have proposed reconsidering the effect of entrepreneurial personalities for a better understanding of entrepreneurship engagement. These unique characteristics could act as an enabler for a capable entrepreneur. Many studies have examined the direct relationship between predictor and intention or between predictor and behaviour. Nevertheless, only a few studies have identified the influence of mediating variables in the theory-based framework. By adding the role of personality traits (i.e. need for achievement and locus of control), this study delivers fascinating insights into the current entrepreneurship research and literature. This study also makes a meaningful contribution to entrepreneurship literature, especially in Malaysia’s context of entrepreneurship ecosystems, considering there are still few studies on women entrepreneurship. This study also provides exposure and explanation of the function of the need for achievement and locus of control as the mediators for the relationship between entrepreneurial knowledge and women entrepreneurs’ e-commerce ventures.

Enterprise success is driven by enterprise actions, which, in turn, is influenced by entrepreneurial behaviours. Behaviours are guided by traits. Hence, it is highly likely that personality traits of entrepreneur are critical to enterprise success. This paper aims at finding the relationship between entrepreneurial traits and enterprise success, identify underlying construct and examine how successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs differ across traits. It also attempts enterprise profiling based on these traits and test predictive validity of entrepreneurial traits on enterprise success.

In this study, 396 micro, small and medium enterprises comprising both successful and unsuccessful ones are studied together across 11 personality traits. Data was analysed using various statistical techniques like co-relation, t-test, factor analysis, cluster analysis and regression to test hypothesis and arrive at given findings.

This study finds there is strong positive co-relations between traits and enterprise success. It establishes that successful and unsuccessful enterprises display distinct traits and significantly differ from each other. Entrepreneurial traits affect enterprise success, and the former has significant predictive value on the later (R-squared = 0.866).

The findings have implications to entrepreneurs in relation to enriching the existing traits and inculcating new ones. Financial institutions like banks can peruse the findings and include traits and behavioural aspects in borrower selection, credit appraisal, evaluation and credit decisioning, to make it more holistic. It also generates scope for further academic research.

This study contributes to existing literature and validates existing findings. It also finds that traits are contagious in nature, together of which can be grouped to build an entrepreneurs’ traits index which exerts strong influence on enterprise success.

This study aims to investigate the Malaysian Mah Meri Indigenous tourism entrepreneur’s personality, experience, sense of community traits and current challenges in community-based tourism (CBT)-related businesses.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted to gather data from 10 Indigenous tourism entrepreneurs. Data were analysed using the NVivo 11 software.

The qualitative content analysis found three broad themes. Firstly, the authors found that the Mah Meri community possesses unique self-efficacy personality characteristics, significantly predicting their unsustainable entrepreneurial behaviours. Secondly, they are willing to share their values, beliefs and interests in their business offerings, which reflect their sense of community. Even with considerable entrepreneurial experience through learning from local wisdom and upskilling efforts by the government, the authors found that the community limitation mainly concerns the lack of early education, uninventive entrepreneurship practices and financial assistance.

This study provides an improved understanding of the Indigenous business environment for policymakers and Indigenous entrepreneurs. We found entrepreneurial personality, experience, sense of community determine and structure their CBT entrepreneurial activities.

This study provides a new perspective on Indigenous tourism entrepreneurs’ personalities, experiences, sense of community traits and challenges. The study also suggests encouraging sustainable Indigenous entrepreneurship practices for economic development, self-determination and community sustainability.

The burgeoning population has an adverse impact on the employability prospects in the emerging economies and has triggered entrepreneurial activities to steer this predicament. The purpose of this study is to explicate the major entrepreneurial competencies that drive firm competitiveness.

Three industrial estates were selected from the two major industrial districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. The study used a cross-sectional design and responses from micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) entrepreneurs were collected by employing a structured questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was applied to empirically validate the proposed hypotheses in the study.

The study discerns the enablers of firm competitiveness and pursuit of excellence. The results reveal that the need for achievement and locus of control competencies strikingly augment firm competitiveness while risk-taking capability and innovativeness competencies aggrandize pursuit of excellence competency. The study further adduces that pursuit of excellence partially mediates between the liaison of risk-taking capability and innovativeness on the one end and firm competitiveness on the other.

The study demonstrates the compelling determinants of firm competitiveness and pursuit of excellence that might embolden training institutes and banks to emphasize the identified competencies for enhancing firm competitiveness and advancing loans.

There is a paucity of literature on “pursuit of excellence” and “firm competitiveness” regarding the MSME sector in India. Therefore, the study contributes to the literature by synthesizing these constructs in an epigrammatic conceptual model. The study is distinctive because it is one of the rare studies to explore the mediating effects of the pursuit of excellence entrepreneurial competency.

This research is in response to the growing need for economic diversification in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as they seek to manage the impacts of volatile oil revenues. To this end, governments in the region are encouraging their citizens to undertake entrepreneurial activities. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of entrepreneurial education (EE), trait competitiveness (TC) and psychological capital (PC) on the entrepreneurial behavior (EB) of university students.

As a quantitative study, primary data were collected through a survey administered to the team of young university students in Oman. Using stratified sampling techniques, 858 questionnaires were retrieved and used for the analysis out of the 1,176 sample. The analysis of the data was done using structural equation modeling.

The results have established a positive influence of EE, TC and PC on the EB of university students in the GCC region. This study also found that PC acts as a bridge between EE, TC and EB.

This paper provides further literature evidence on the contribution of other variables like TC and PC to EB, particularly in the GCC context, by providing a model of the influence mechanism on EB. This research reveals a very unique influence of PC on the relationship between TC and EB. The findings confirm that there is no direct relationship between TC and EB. However, the relationship was established with the introduction of PC.

Recent years have seen a meteoric rise in the study of narcissism in entrepreneurship, although little consolidation has occurred in this area. The purpose of this paper is the development of an integrative framework to harmonise the academic discussion and serve as a structured foundation for future research.

The authors conducted an artificial intelligence-aided, structured literature review focused on content analysis of concepts and contexts to map out current findings and research gaps in startup narcissism research.

According to the findings of this study, narcissistic tendencies have the potential to positively influence startup success early on in an entrepreneur's journey, but after a certain point in the process, the influence of narcissism on success becomes predominantly negative.

The research field is currently not very harmonised regarding research measures, research subjects and key research terms. Further research must use a standardised approach to add value to the research body.

Narcissism is a two-sided sword for founders. In the early stages of a company, many of the founder’s tasks can benefit from narcissistic tendencies. In the later stages of a company, that might shift to overwhelmingly negative effects of narcissism.

Methodically, this study is the first one to establish an artificial intelligence component to add value to the results of a review paper to the best of the authors’ knowledge. The results of this study provide a clear framework of entrepreneurial intention, entrepreneurial activity and entrepreneurial performance to give researchers the opportunity of a more differentiated way of organising work.