IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rcitxx/v23y2020i17p2146-2164.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Start-up entrepreneurs’ personality traits. An exploratory analysis of the Italian tourism industry

Author

Listed:
  • Angelo Presenza
  • Tindara Abbate
  • Marta Meleddu
  • Lorn Sheehan

Abstract

This study examines the personality traits of start-up entrepreneurs within the Italian tourism industry. The purpose is to investigate how the specific personality traits of narcissism, locus of control, and the Big Five (i.e. extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience) influence the tourism start-up entrepreneur’s behaviour. After a review and assessment of the literature regarding entrepreneurs’ personality traits, the paper describes a quantitative analysis of eighty-nine Italian start-up entrepreneurs operating in the tourism sector. Two main results arose from the empirical analysis. Firstly, tourism entrepreneurs seem to be particularly narcissistic, extroverted and friendly (extraversion), disciplined (agreeableness), self-assured, efficient and organized (conscientiousness), unconventional (openness to experience), and proactive and vigorous (internal locus of control). Secondly, some personality traits are found to influence the efficiency and innovative capacity of entrepreneurs which ultimately lead to the success of start-ups. The paper further advances our understanding of tourism entrepreneurship by clarifying the relevance of specific personality traits that characterize start-up entrepreneurs in the tourism industry.

Suggested Citation

  • Angelo Presenza & Tindara Abbate & Marta Meleddu & Lorn Sheehan, 2020. "Start-up entrepreneurs’ personality traits. An exploratory analysis of the Italian tourism industry," Current Issues in Tourism, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(17), pages 2146-2164, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:rcitxx:v:23:y:2020:i:17:p:2146-2164
    DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2019.1677572
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13683500.2019.1677572
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13683500.2019.1677572?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rcitxx:v:23:y:2020:i:17:p:2146-2164. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rcit .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.