The effect of university students' entrepreneurial personality traits on their entrepreneurship propensity

The increase in the young population and the unemployment rates in our country have caused the importance of creating new employment to increase a lot. New business ventures, which play a key role in the creation of new businesses, are of utmost importance in terms of economic development. However, in order for these new ventures to increase in number, our country is in need of young entrepreneurs. Without a doubt, the group which has the potential of taking an active role in this process is university students. Because they are the business people of the future and because they take courses in entrepreneurship, especially students of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences learn what a new venture needs to be like, how to be successful and what to do in order to achieve this better than others. However, the fact that students learn all these does not mean that they are going to be successful entrepreneurs. In order to become an entrepreneur, one has to have the motivation above all else. Furthermore, one has to have certain personality traits in order for this motivation to exist and the conditions need to be suitable to undertake a venture. In this study, because they are acknowledged as the potential entrepreneurs of the future, the entrepreneurial propensity and entrepreneurial personality traits of university students will be measured and the relationship between these will be explored. Later, it will be investigated whether some factors which are believed to affect entrepreneurial intentions have an impact on students' entrepreneurial propensity. In this context, the departments of business in four universities in Istanbul were visited and a survey to measure their entrepreneurial personality traits and entrepreneurial propensity was distributed. The data was analysed using the SPSS program. The results indicated that the students who took part in the survey had a high entrepreneurial propensity and that they had the entrepreneurial personality traits. Apart from their personality traits, the students' entrepreneurial propensity also showed a statistically meaningful relationship with the university type, whether they had role models and whether they could access the necessary funds to become entrepreneurs. Another important result was that the students' entrepreneurial propensity did not have a meaningful relationship with the students' department, but that it had a meaningful relationship with the fact that the students took a class in entrepreneurship. Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Personality Traits, Entrepreneurial Propensity, Entrepreneurship Education, University Students