Effect of personal characteristics and gender on entrepreneurship and innovativeness: A comparative study on Turkish entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship is an essential factor for today?s economy of knowledge to manage its competitive and dynamic nature. Both governments and academics appear to be concentrating on encouraging entrepreneurship as it symbolizes innovation. Entrepreneurship also has been characterized as a major force for job creation, and a vital determinant of economic growth.Early work on entrepreneurship focused predominantly on male entrepreneurs, which was the most representative group in terms of numbers. Only from the late 1970s research on female entrepreneurship began to develop, starting out with studying the psychological and sociological characteristics of female entrepreneurs. Although female entrepreneurship is no longer an understudied phenomenon, there are still research areas that have received little or no attention. Moreover, the entrepreneurship studies that have concentrated on gender present inconclusive evidence of gender differences in entrepreneurship. However, this inconclusive evidence has been attributed to methodological weaknesses of female entrepreneurship research, including the use of small, convenience and non-mixed samples. The aim of this study is to create more insight into those areas where female entrepreneurship research to date has been inconclusive and to contribute to methodological development of 1) female entrepreneurship research by identifying the factors that effect entrepreneurial activity of Turkish female entrepreneurs and 2) a model to explain the effect of the personality characteristics on entrepreneurial activity and innovativeness.Given that the theories on women entrepreneurs have emerged primarily from research in developed countries, it is important to examine the extent to which these apply in the context of developing ones, such as Turkey.The sample is drawn using the stratified sampling technique from small businesses registered at the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce and consist of 300 entrepreneurs (107 female and 193 male). The findings of this study indicate that gender based differences among female and male entrepreneurs are in their marital status, age, number of children, financial problems faced, gender based problems, and reasons for becoming entrepreneurs. Turkish entrepreneurs demonstrated a high percentage of external locus of control (41.3 %). However, the mean locus of control scale for female entrepreneurs was not significantly different from that of their counterparts. Gender is also found to affect the product innovativeness-market dimension where men are found to be more innovative than female entrepreneurs.Besides providing a significant contribution to the limited literature on entrepreneurial activity in Turkey as well as the role of gender, this study also provides practical information to better understand the characteristics, needs, and problems of Turkish entrepreneurs and can be used to guide national entrepreneurship support programs.