Entrepreneurship Effectiveness: A Meta-Analysis on Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurial activities have always been one of the important driving forces for the economic development of all countries in the world. As the implementer of the whole entrepreneurial activity, the entrepreneur plays a very important role in entrepreneurial activities. Scholars have pointed that entrepreneurs’ individual characteristics are one of the important factors to explain how entrepreneurial vision changes into entrepreneurial action, and the entrepreneurial performance is influenced by cultural differences, perceptions of the external environment and social norms. The core of the entrepreneurs’ individual characteristics, such as entrepreneurial spirit quality, social relationship and learning ability, are the important factors that affect the entrepreneurial process and its performance. However, due to the differences of sample selection and research perspective, scholars have different understandings on the influence mechanism of entrepreneurs’ individual characteristics on entrepreneurial performance. Therefore, this study attempts to use the meta-analysis to make a comprehensive comparative analysis of the previous studies on the relationship between entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial performance, hoping to draw a theoretical framework for the integrated relationship between entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial performance.　　This study discusses the general influence mechanism of entrepreneurs’ individual characteristics on entrepreneurial performance from three aspects: entrepreneur spirit, social capital and learning ability. Entrepreneurial performance is divided into survival performance and growth performance. Besides, due to the individual characteristics and behaviors of entrepreneurs are influenced by personal growth environment and social experience. The communication and interaction mechanism in the entrepreneurial process is mainly influenced by local policies, institutions and specific trading patterns. Therefore, in this paper, we add two influential factors of entrepreneurial culture background and entrepreneurial environment, and discuss the possible moderating effect of entrepreneurs’ cultural background and entrepreneurial environment.　　In the process of data-analysis, we conduct the meta binary heterogeneity test first, and the results show there are significant different mechanisms among the entrepreneur spirit, social capital, learning capability and entrepreneurial performance. More specifically, entrepreneur spirit and social capital, social capital and learning ability have significant differences on the impact of growth performance respectively. Entrepreneur spirit and social capital, entrepreneur spirit and learning ability also have significant differences on the impact of survival performance respectively. In addition, there are significant differences between entrepreneurs’ cultural background and entrepreneurial environment on the impact of entrepreneurial performance. Secondly, meta-regression analysis shows that social capital and learning ability have a significant impact on entrepreneurial performance: social capital is the main factor that influences growth performance, and learning ability can significantly affect the survival performance; entrepreneurial environment plays an important moderating role in the relationship between entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial performance, growth performance, survival performance.