Big Five Personality Theory: The Five-Factor Model (FFM)

1. INTRODUCTION

Various personality traits have been identified during the past decades, nevertheless, they have been group into five broadly defined dimensions of personality trait which are known as the Five-Factor Model (FFM) or Big Five personality theory (Bergner, Neubauer & Kreuzthaler, 2010; McCrae & Costa, 2008). The model consists of five type of personality traits namely, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (McCrae & Costa, 2008). The FFM is a comprehensive arrangement of personality traits, which are tendencies to show constant patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions (Bergner, Neubauer & Kreuzthaler, 2010; McCrae & Costa, 2008). Researchers such as Yan (2010) along with Gupta and Muita (2012)

It exhibits a sense of adventure that highlights a certain level of curiosity as opened persons usually pursuit new experiences (Rothmann & Coetzer, 2003). Low levels of openness to experience individuals are considered as uptight and conservative in nature (Matthews, Deary & Whiteman, 2003; Rothmann & Coetzer, 2003). In contrast, people with high on openness to experience tend to be unconventional, willing to question authority (Rothmann & Coetzer, 2003). It is believed that the level or degree of openness to experience reduces as an individual grow old and this explains why in old age, hence, the acceptance of new ideas is very hard (McCrae, 2002). Openness to experience boost a person intention to be an entrepreneur (Gupta & Muita, 2012; Leutner et al.,

Personality traits are associated with the intention of starting a venture (Gupta & Muita, 2012; Leutner et al., 2014). In addition, the personality traits of an entrepreneur influence the strategic decisions and actions of a firm which eventually have implications on the firm’s performance (Nadkarni & Herrmann, 2010). It was found that the there is indeed a relationship between the entrepreneur’s personality traits and the business success (Gupta & Muita, 2012). From the Five-Factor Model that was reviewed, the personality traits that have shown correlation with business success are: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion and Low Neuroticism (Baer, 2014; Bergner, Neubauer & Kreuzthaler, 2010; Gupta & Muita, 2012; Leutner et al., 2014). Those traits were recognised influencing the entrepreneurial success, the financial performance, the development performance of the enterprise and managerial success (Baer, 2014; Bergner, Neubauer & Kreuzthaler, 2010; Gupta & Muita, 2012; Leutner et al.,