The 10 entrepreneurial behaviors: from McClelland to your profile
In the 1980s a team linked to David McClelland interviewed entrepreneurs in three countries and described ten behaviors that set the most successful apart from average ones. This profile measures how often you practice them.
Where the model comes from
David McClelland, a Harvard psychologist, spent decades studying achievement motivation: the drive to do something better than before, on your own initiative. In The Achieving Society (1961) he argued that this motive helped explain the rise of entrepreneurs and the economic growth of whole societies.
In the 1980s McBer & Co., the consultancy McClelland founded, ran a study for the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The team held long, detailed interviews about real episodes with entrepreneurs in India, Malawi and Ecuador, comparing high performers with average ones (Mansfield et al., 1987; McClelland, 1987). Those interviews produced a list of competencies that, once condensed, became known as the ten personal entrepreneurial competencies (PECs), grouped in three clusters: achievement, planning and power.
Since then the model has been used in entrepreneurship training in dozens of countries, including programmes supported by the United Nations (UNCTAD).
The ten behaviors
Achievement: opportunity seeking and initiative; calculated risk-taking; demand for quality and efficiency; persistence; commitment.
Planning: information seeking; goal setting; systematic planning and monitoring.
Power: persuasion and networking; independence and self-confidence.
The core idea is that these are behaviors, not fixed traits: things you do more or less often, and that can be trained.
What the research says
Meta-analyses confirm that achievement motivation relates both to choosing entrepreneurship and to business performance, but the effect is moderate, not decisive (Collins, Hanges & Locke, 2004; Stewart & Roth, 2007). Reviews of personality and entrepreneurship reach a similar conclusion: traits and behaviors tied to action, achievement and autonomy matter, alongside context, resources and luck (Rauch & Frese, 2007).
Brazilian studies of self-rating questionnaires based on the ten behaviors find good internal consistency overall, but also show that the ten tend to load on one general factor rather than forming ten clearly separate dimensions (Mourão & Locatelli, 2020).
Limitations
This is a self-report: it measures how you see yourself, and people tend to describe themselves a little better than they act. That's why the profile includes consistency questions and flags answers that look too perfect. The ten behaviors overlap a lot, so small differences between them shouldn't be taken literally. This Ethea version has no predictive-validity studies of its own yet. Use the result to choose what to develop, never to select or appraise people.
How Ethea adapts the model
The 40 statements were written by Ethea from the published description of the ten behaviors; they are not the original questionnaire or a translation of it. There are four statements per behavior, one of them reversed to reduce the tendency to agree with everything, plus four consistency questions that don't count toward the score. Each behavior and each cluster becomes a 0–100 score. The result highlights your three strongest behaviors, with the risk of each when overused, the three most worth developing, each with one practice, and combinations that tend to stall results.
Test created by Giovanni Oliveira.
An independent profile, not affiliated with any entrepreneurship training programme that uses the same model.
References
Links with a DOI go to the original article. Where no DOI is given, the link opens a Google Scholar search.
- McClelland, D. C. (1961). The Achieving Society. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
- McClelland, D. C. (1987). Characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. Journal of Creative Behavior, 21(3), 219–233. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
- Mansfield, R. S., McClelland, D. C., Spencer, L. M., & Santiago, J. (1987). The identification and assessment of competencies and other personal characteristics of entrepreneurs in developing countries. Final report, McBer and Company for USAID. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
- Collins, C. J., Hanges, P. J., & Locke, E. A. (2004). The relationship of achievement motivation to entrepreneurial behavior: A meta-analysis. Human Performance, 17(1), 95–117. DOI: 10.1207/S15327043HUP1701_5(opens in a new tab)
- Stewart, W. H., & Roth, P. L. (2007). A meta-analysis of achievement motivation differences between entrepreneurs and managers. Journal of Small Business Management, 45(4), 401–421. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
- Rauch, A., & Frese, M. (2007). Let's put the person back into entrepreneurship research: A meta-analysis on the relationship between business owners' personality traits, business creation, and success. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 16(4), 353–385. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
- Mourão, P. R., & Locatelli, D. R. S. (2020). Testing McClelland at the Academy: An Analysis of Entrepreneurial Behavioral Characteristics. Sustainability, 12(5), 1771. DOI: 10.3390/su12051771(opens in a new tab)