According to Scott Shane’s Illusions of Entrepreneurship, “the typical entrepreneur looks a lot less like Bill Gates and a lot more like the guy who lives across the street from you or sits next to you at church” (p.41). Shane goes on to give this profile of the typical entrepreneur:
- White man married in his forties
- Has a working spouse
- Was born in the US and has lived here his whole life
- Has spent much of his life in the town where he started his business
- Is just trying to make a living, not trying to build a high-growth business
- Worked previously in the industry in which he started his company, something like construction or insurance or retail
- Has no special psychological characteristics
The last one was at first a disappointment for me since I am developing a brand new course in entrepreneurial psychology. As we know from my previous posts on entrepreneurial optimism and entrepreneurs and the “big five”, there are studies out there on the psychological characteristics of entrepreneurs that have some interesting findings. Shane himself reports that entrepreneurs are more satisfied with their work than managers, and satisfaction is a psychological attitude.
I think his point is we can’t use a psychological profile to predict if someone is going to become a successful entrepreneur. While it’s true that anyone can become an entrepreneur, the average one is not a larger than life hero figure the media has made her/him out to be.
Organizational psychology is not just about attitudes and personalities; it’s also about behaviors that lead to important outcomes like performance and health. As I’ve stated before, even though we can’t be someone different, we can learn behaviors that have been shown to be the best predictors of the goals we desire.
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