Novel Opportunity Exploitation: Impact of Personality, Environment and Uncertainty Avoidance Culture

This study shows that the joint effects of the entrepreneur’s personality and an unpredictable environment, as well as the interaction effects of a low uncertainty avoidance culture, predict opportunity exploitation. Our study’s findings are consistent with the emerging opportunity-exploiter nexus framework of Shane and Venkataraman, which posits that the rate and nature of entrepreneurial exploitation activities are jointly determined by the nexus of environmental factors that shape the emergence of opportunities and the supply of opportunity-seekers with the right entrepreneurial personalities to exploit such opportunities. Specifically, we found that entrepreneurs who display a high level of extroversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and non-neuroticism, have a greater propensity to exploit novel opportunities in unpredictable environments and low uncertainty avoidance cultures. A study involving 570 entrepreneurs from UK, Thailand, and South Korea reveals that the interaction effects between personality and environmental unpredictability is more pronounced in cultures with a low high degree of uncertainty avoidance.