Person-Environment Fit and Self-Employment: Opportunities and Needs for Achievement, Affiliation, Autonomy, And Dominance (Report‪)‬

Theories of person-environment fit have long been prevalent in management literature (Kristof, 1996; Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman, & Johnson, 2005; Schneider, 2001) and are used to explain how individuals' personalities and traits influence them to join and remain in organizations (Bernard, 1938; Schneider, 1987) and vocations (Dawis & Lofquist, 1984; Holland, 1985; Schein, 1978, 1994) and engage in entrepreneurial activities (McClelland, 1961; Schumpeter, 1934). Entrepreneurial trait researchers commonly use a design that compares a subgroup of study participants labeled as entrepreneurs to a subgroup of participants labeled as non-entrepreneurs with respect to specified personality characteristics. However, Gartner (1988) criticized prior trait research for using definitions of entrepreneurs that were vague or nonexistent and which varied across studies. This lack of definitional precision often led, in his view, to samples of entrepreneurs that were heterogeneous (for example, combining small business owners with people who serially created new organizations with high growth aspirations. Finally, he argued that researchers studied an excessive number of different traits and characteristics. Researchers have more recently adopted meta-analytical techniques and the Five Factor personality model as an organizing framework to quantitatively review multiple studies (Collins, Hanges, & Locke, 2004; Rauch & Frese; 2007; Stewart & Roth, 2001, 2007, Zhao & Seibert, 2006). Subsequently, primary researchers, while accepting that there is no universally accepted narrow definition of an entrepreneur and have developed alternative typologies to distinguish among types of entrepreneurs based on their characteristics and objectives (Hisrich, Langan-Fox, & Grant, 2007). Researchers have also provided more detailed information on the criteria for classifying individuals into different subgroups and recognized that entrepreneurs are not a homogeneous. Researchers have adopted meta-analytical techniques and the Five Factor personality model as an organizing framework to quantitatively review primary research studies that employed different definitions of participants and assessed different traits (Collins et al, 2004; Rauch & Frese; 2007; Stewart & Roth, 2001, 2007, Zhao & Seibert, 2006)