The forces of a character: does an entrepreneur's personality affect organizational culture

Abstract

Theory suggests that the source of an organization’s culture is the founder, yet few empirical studies exist on the relationship between the entrepreneur’s personality and the organizational culture. However, the constructs of personality dimensions and organisational culture have been well developed and researched. For years, entrepreneurship research has explored the implications of the entrepreneur’s personality, with the majority of the work focused on the individual’s likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur. This study examines the relationship of the entrepreneurs personality to organizational culture. Four of the Big Five Factor personality attributes, namely, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Openness to Experience and Agreeableness, provide the measures of the entrepreneur’s personality. The competing values model measured the Hierarchical, Market, Adhocracy and Clan organizational cultures. As hypothesised the individual constructs that were found to have strong significant relationships between the personality dimensions and organisational cultures were Conscientiousness and Hierarchical culture; Openness to Experience and Adhocracy culture; and Agreeableness and Clan culture. Extraversion and Market culture were found to have a negative relationship. Influence as a moderator was found to be insignificant. Copyright