The Triggers of Personality Traits, Entrepreneurial Motivation, and Competencies: A Qualitative Study of E-Commerce Venture Creation in Malaysia

Abstract

The last three decades have revealed the primary elements of entrepreneurship, especially for newly-created venture creation processes, throughout various works and heavy emphasis by scholars. An entrepreneur can be viewed as the principal component in entrepreneurship; they are tasked with creating new ventures, which requires cognitive and personality motivations and specific competencies to achieve such aim. Prior scholars investigating the elements of entrepreneurial psychology have succinctly viewed the general process of new venture creation, whereas e-commerce ventures have been disregarded. Furthermore, such works have expended the least efforts on entrepreneurial competencies resulting in e-commerce new venture creations. Accordingly, this study is attempting to bridge such gap and aims to distinguish the role played by personality traits, motivation, and competencies that promote new e-commerce ventures creation in Malaysia. To this end, a case study approach was implemented by which data collection was undertaken via interviews with 12 e-commerce entrepreneurs, which spanned from May 2013 until December 2014. As a result, seven crucial components of personalities were found to impact e-commerce new ventures in Malaysia, such as creativity, risk-taking, inspiration, need for autonomy and freedom, tolerance of ambiguity, hardworking and persistence, and optimism. Entrepreneurs could be driven by internal and external motivations, thus leading the identification of two groups of entrepreneurial motivation with regard to the former in this work, namely: (i) need for achievement, and (ii) interest. In contrast, external motivation was an outcome following correspondence with a conducive climate, such as consumers, family members, and surrounding industries. This resulted in an elevated entrepreneur motivation influencing the overall business success. Furthermore, the findings underlined the substantial contribution of entrepreneurial competencies in terms of computer and communication skills both towards new ventures creation