AN APPRAISAL OF SUCCESS CRITERIA FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS IN NIGERIA
CHAPTER ONE
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Management School of Entrepreneurship The management school suggests that an entrepreneur is a person who organizes or manages a business undertaking, assuming the risk for the sake of profit (Webster, 1966). Within this perspective, it is believed that entrepreneurship can be developed through conscious learning. In most cases, failure in entrepreneurial activities is attributed to poor management
tactics. It is therefore, averred that training in management functions can help reduce business failure substantially and make success of an enterprise. Leadership School of Entrepreneurship ;
The leadership school of entrepreneurship sees an entrepreneur as someone who relies on those he believes can
help him achieve his purposes and objectives. This school proposes that a successful entrepreneur must be a‘people
manager’, an effective leader, a mentor who motivates, directs and leads others to accomplish set tasks.
Kao (1989) postulates that the entrepreneur must be a leader, able to define a vision of what is possible, and attract
people to rally around that vision and transform it into reality. The two major elements in this approachare: getting the
task accomplished and responding to the needs of those involved in task accomplishment. Personality Based Model
Both personality- and human capital models are examples of character-based model. According to personality based
model, entrepreneurs posses certain traits and these specific traits are expected to produce a strong impact on
planning the business and on the choice of strategies and actions during the launching phase, which will in turn
determine the entrepreneur’s eventual success in the undertaking.
In particular psychological but also economic research has analyzed in detail which personality characteristics are
fundamental for entrepreneurial success. The following traits have been defined as useful in explaining the past
success and in predicting the future development of a newly founded business: motivational traits, such as need for achievement',
internal locus of control’, and need for autonomy', cognitive skills such as
problem-solving
orientation’, tolerance of ambiguity',
creativity’ and risk-taking propensity', affective personality traits, such as
stress
resistance’, emotional stability', and
level of arousal’, and social skills, such asinterpersonal reactivity' and
assertiveness’ (Caliendo and Kritikos, 2007). Empirical research aiming to underpin the theoretical propositions expost has taken two directions: it has compared the parameter values of these variables, gathered with the help of
psychologically validated questionnaires, either between entrepreneurs and employees, or between successful and
unsuccessful entrepreneurs.Previous research has also pointed out the limits of this approach. On the one hand, the
size of the firm in terms of number of employees has been described as indispensable for the application of the
model.According to this argument, the fewer employees a business has, the greater the impact of the owner’s
personality on its success. On the other hand, there is no consensus on the impact of personality structure on
entrepreneurial success. Muller (1999) suggests that these traits should be used to predict the development of an
individual as entrepreneur. Given the numerous personality variables that might influence entrepreneurial success, a
second expectation is that each individual variable will only be a weak predictor for entrepreneurial success (Rauch
and Frese, 2000). Gartner (1988) believes that no correlations will be found between traits and the success of an entrepreneur at all.
AN APPRAISAL OF SUCCESS CRITERIA FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP BUSINESS IN NIGERIA