Let’s Put the Person Back into Entrepreneurship Research: A Meta-Analysis on the Relationship between Business Owners’ Personality Traits, Business Creation, and Success Short Title: Meta-analysis on entrepreneurs’ personality

The role of personality traits in the decision to start a business and to maintain it successfully is discussed controversially in entrepreneurship research. Our meta-analyses builds upon and extends earlier meta-analyses by doing a full analysis of personality traits that includes a comparison of different traits from a theoretical perspective and by analyzing a full set of personality predictors for both start-up activities as well as success. Theoretically, our article adds to the literature by matching traits to the tasks of entrepreneurs. The results indicate that traits matched to the task of running a business produced higher effect sizes with business creation than traits that were not matched to the task of running an enterprise (corrected r=.247 (K=47, N=13,280) and corrected r=.124 (K=20, N= 3975), respectively). Moreover, traits matched to the task produced higher correlations with success (corrected r=.250, K=42, N=5607) than traits not matched to the task of running a business (corrected r=.028, K=13, N=2777). The traits matched to entrepreneurship significantly correlated with entrepreneurial behavior (business creation, business success) were need for achievement, generalized selfefficacy, innovativeness, stress tolerance, need for autonomy, and pro-active personality. These relationships were of moderate size in general and, moreover, heterogeneity suggested that future research should analyze moderator variables. 2