Does personality traits kindles opportunity recognition?: An empirical analysis

Abstract

Background

For long, the entrepreneurship literatures has recognized entrepreneurship traits as potential means that enhance entrepreneurs competitive advantages and boost their innovative performance. Traits like self-confidence, innovativeness, need for success, locus of control and risk taking had been documented as important traits that form good entrepreneurship skills that enable opportunity recognition.

Objectives

The paper investigates wether individual personality traits (Innovativeness INN, Locus of Control LOC, Need for Achievement NAC, Self-Efficacy SEF and Tolerance to Risk TOR) have any effects on individual Opportunity Recognition (OPR).

Methodology

To ascertain the relationships between the variables, a survey was administered to 242 undergraduate students in four different tertiary institutions in Gombe State of Nigeria and SEM PLS 3 software was used for the analyses

Results

The results suggest positive and significance effect of INN, LOC, NAC, SEF and TOR on EIN.

Unique contribution

There is little evidence in the literature to suggest that the combination of these traits (INN, LOC, NAC, SEF and TOR) have been studied together in order to test how they co-relate to determining the opportunity recognition ability of undergraduate students in Nigeria

Definite conclusion

The study shows how effective are the personality traits employed by the study in predicting individual student’s entrepreneurship intention through opportunity recognition. 

Key recommendations

Educators should focus more on learning contents that feeds and sustains the students need to pursue meaningful life goals through entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. Thus, practical teaching strategies including the use of mentors, advisors and role models could be of great help.