Linking entrepreneurial attributes to entrepreneurial performance: an empirical study of young entrepreneurs

Young entrepreneurs play a major role of entrepreneurship, but their average successful rate is only about 2%, showing very low entrepreneurial performance. The entrepreneurial attribute of young entrepreneurs, which greatly influences entrepreneurial performance, includes many aspects and may interact complicatedly with each other, posing great challenges to the cultivation of entrepreneurial talents. In this paper, the constitution of entrepreneurial attribute was systematically summarized as entrepreneurial personality, entrepreneurial competence and entrepreneurial knowledge. The relationship between entrepreneurial performance and these three parts was then empirically studied. It was found that the influence of entrepreneurial knowledge was the most significant and entrepreneurial competence took the second place. Moreover, the direct impact of entrepreneurial personality on entrepreneurial performance was not significant, which was completely mediated by entrepreneurial knowledge and entrepreneurial competence. These three variables of entrepreneurial personality, entrepreneurial competence, and entrepreneurial knowledge explained 60.1% variation of entrepreneurial performance, which indicated that the empirical results verified the theoretical model well. These findings not only make a breakthrough in the theoretical research of entrepreneurial attribute, but also have practical applications on cultivation and education strategy of young entrepreneurs.