Critically Assess the Personality (or Psychological) Traits Approach Essay

Critically Assess the Personality (or Psychological) Traits Approach to Explaining Entrepreneurship - Essay Example There is a positive link associating the environment and prevailing situation, and the characteristics needed in entrepreneurship, because personalities or characteristics of an individual are linked with the environment (Littunen, 2000). Therefore, based on this idea, experiences and further changes in the person’s life are crucial to the understanding of personality and entrepreneurship as well. In this paper, the proponent critically assesses the personality (or psychological) traits approach to explaining entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs and the development of their personality traits Personality is defined as an individual’s pattern of behaviours that differentiate him or her from the other, creating certain uniqueness on that person (Feldman, 2003). There are varying psychological approaches in understanding personality and from psychoanalytic perspective, each personality is a significant effect of unconscious forces. These unconscious forces are integral parts of individual’s personality that could potentially determine behaviour. However, aside from this approach, there are still varying theories aiming to identify or understand what personality is all about and that includes the idea of understanding the interplay between the individual and environment (Feldman, 2003). It is important to understand that entrepreneurship is specifically an activity that is created in a business environment where an entrepreneur has the ability or even a chance to develop personal traits in the process in order to be successful in conducting or running an enterprise. In other words, there is a great possible reason to believe that creativity for instance can be learned along the process in conducting or doing a business because it could substantially promise an individual on how to successfully obtain his or her objectives. Moreover, it is possible to obtain the fact that it is not necessary to carry certain personality traits that successful busines s persons posses prior to venturing into business just to be successful. After all, business could be a series of trial and error in which along the process, an individual may find an opportunity to develop special skills or even personalities that could lead him or her to success in business. In the study of Littunen (2000), entrepreneurship was found to have an effect on the personality characteristics of the entrepreneur. On this ground, there is a significant reason to use individual’s characteristics in explaining what entrepreneurship is all about. After all, entrepreneurship could potentially develop certain characteristics and this would mean there is something powerful force about it that could substantially change a person. In great important detail, entrepreneurship enhances a person’s potential in the enterprise. In other words, entrepreneurship is a potential training ground for an entrepreneur to enhance more specific character or personality traits. This specifically proves that personality can be acquired aside from the fact that some theories potentially suggest that it could be innate at some point (Feldman, 2003). Although it was strongly argued that personality is innate based on the basic understanding on the twins’ personalities, there are substantial studies which can also prove that it can be learned through a person’s experience (Jacoby and Youngson, 2004). The following are specific examples