The Psychological Profile of Tunisian SMEs Founders Amid the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to determine the psychological profile of the Tunisian SMEs founder amid the COVID-19 crisis. The results of this research demonstrated that their psychological profile in times of COVID-19 crisis is quadridimensional and that each of these four dimensions (tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, attitude towards risk, self-confidence and locus of control) are unidimensional. This research was conducted in three Tunisian industries (textiles and clothing industries, agro-food industries and industries of ceramic and glass building materials) via the administration of a questionnaire via LinkedIn (between March, 15 and May, 15 2020) to more than 400 SMEs’ founders. The critical contributions of this research are the clarification of the role of psychological factors in the field of entrepreneurship, which remains unclear, by enriching previous research on entrepreneurial personality. The main findings of this study: (1) the four key psychological traits correspond to the “specific traits” of an entrepreneur; (2) these “specific traits” are more suitable to study the profile of the SME’s founder profile at the time of crisis than the more “stable traits” — the Big Five traits; (3) the psychological profile of the SME’s founder in a hyper-turbulent environment (namely the COVID-19 crisis) correspond to the psychological entrepreneurial profile.