Psychological Approaches to Entrepreneurship

The study of entrepreneurship is important because small and medium-sized enterprises are the major agents of economic growth and employment (99% of European companies are small or medium-sized and provide 66% of the working places). From a psychological point of view, the study is interesting because small-scale entrepreneurs have to work on a complex set of tasks, such as development of the organization, leadership, and organizational issues. The common theme of this special issue is to look at personality predictors of success and entrepreneurial behaviour. All the articles in this issue take as a starting point a sophisticated personality concept that was traditionally done. Thus, it is our hope that this new approach to personality will be seen as much more fruitful within entrepreneurship research than it has been in the one used until now.