Entrepreneurial Characteristics among Small Business Owners in the Accra area

This paper examines the issue of entrepreneurial traits and their actual presence and intensity among various groups in a population (business owners in the manufacturing sector, in the trade sector and the general population). After providing an overview of the attributes of the entrepreneur as they appear in the literature, a brief discussion of the role of culture in fostering entrepreneurial attitudes is presented. The main part of this paper gives a descriptive presentation of some of the results of research carried out in the greater Accra city area of Ghana as a part of wider research to test the hypotheses that: i) entrepreneurial traits are attributes of entrepreneurs/small business owners everywhere, irrespective of their cultural background; and ii) these characteristics are typical; i.e., within a given culture entrepreneurs/small business owners will possess these traits to a larger extent than general population Some entrepreneurial characteristics were selected and the intensity of their presence measured. From the results, it appears that these entrepreneurial traits are present among business owners (although not all strongly so), that there is a clear difference between business owners and non-business owners according to the intensity of the presence of most of these traits, and that there is a clear difference between owners of manufacturing activities and traders.