Work

The necessity of targeted aptitude diagnostics for company founders: relationships between personality traits, perceived stress, satisfaction, and performance

Year: 2020

Type: article

Abstract: In the course of a growing start-up market and strongly increasing investment volume, investors try to predict the success of a business as precisely as possible in advance. However, when assessing the personality of the founder or founding team, they still rely far too often on their gut feeling, thereby reducing the quality of their decisions. Our study therefore aimed at investigating whether there are any relationships between the founders' personality traits and their performance and thus justifying the need for more targeted and optimized diagnostics in the field of founder personality. With a total of 141 founders, clear correlations between personality traits (conscientiousness, emotional stability) and performance could be demonstrated in the present study. In addition, it became evident that perceived stress is also related to the founders' personality (emotional stability negative, conscientiousness positive) and in turn has a negative effect on performance. Our findings contribute to raising awareness of the importance of personality as a predictor of founders' performance, improving decision-making, and, in the long run, replacing gut feeling as an inappropriate assessment criterion of investors.

Source: Heliyon

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04987

Authors: L. Fichter, C. von Bernstorff, S. Rohrmann

Institutions: Goethe University Frankfurt, BSP Business & Law School – Hochschule für Management und Recht

Language: English

Topic: Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences

Subfield: Management of Technology and Innovation

Field: Business, Management and Accounting

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,888

Funder: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main