General versus specific personality traits for predicting entrepreneurship

Personality traits play an important role when it comes to predicting people's entrepreneurial behaviour. The objective of this study was to determine whether the specific traits of enterprising personality predicted entrepreneurial behaviour better than general (Big Five type) traits. The sample comprised 1153 working people (33% entrepreneurs). The mean age of the sample was 41.72 years old (SD = 12.32). The five general personality traits (Big Five) were evaluated using the Overall Personality Assessment Scale and the eight specific traits were measured with the Battery for the Assessment of the Enterprising Personality (BEPE). The differences between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs were greater in the specific personality traits than in the more general traits, with mean effect sizes of 0.54 and 0.21, respectively. The predictive capacity of the specific traits (R2 = 0.21) was greater than that of the general traits (R2 = 0.07). The ROC curves for the specific traits gave higher areas under the curve (0.74) than the general traits (0.56). The canonical correlation between the eight specific BEPE dimensions and the Big Five factors was 0.77. The specific personality traits demonstrated better predictive and discriminative capacity for enterprising behaviour than the more general, Big-Five type traits. •Entrepreneurs had higher scores than non-entrepreneurs only in Emotional Stability and Extraversion.•The traits which exhibited more notable differences were Innovativeness, Autonomy, and Risk-taking.•The canonical correlation between the eight specific dimensions and the Big Five factors was 0.77.•The ROC curves for the specific traits gave higher areas under the curve (0.74) than the general traits (0.56).•The predictive capacity of the specific traits was greater than that of the general traits.