Abstract:

Entrepreneurs have some differentiating personality characteristics, personal values and behaviors comparing to the employees. The focus of this paper is to review these differentiating qualities with an organizational psychology perspective. The main questions are: Which characteristics make a person to start a new business and then maintain it with a success. The definitions of entrepreneurship and the research findings about the personal characteristics were filtered in terms of leadership and individual competencies. Entrepreneurial capacity, especially in terms of innovation and product development, is also a quality for the established businesses to compete and survive. So the companies are developing internal entrepreneurship programs in order to develop their employees entrepreneurships. The difference or the commonality of the entrepreneur and leader is another important issue, especially for corporate entrepreneurship domain. At the beginnings of entrepreneurship studies, the entrepreneur was perceived as the leader at the same time. The personality traits which are considered as spesific to entrepreneurs should define with an individual framework of a competency model. So instead of "entrepreneurial spirit" it will enable us to be talking behaviors in a more concrete way. This competency modeling will also play a critic role in human resources systems such as entrepreneurship training and development programs

Keywords: