The Mirror Image of Dutch Speaking Self-employed Entrepreneurs in Belgium

It is often asked what it takes to be an entrepreneur or self-employed. However, less attention is given to the actual image of self-employed. A positive or negative image may contribute to what extent people associate themselves to self-employment. The goal of this paper is to determine the mirror image of Dutch speaking self-employed in Belgium. The image is expressed as personality traits from the Big Five personality trait framework. A quantitative online survey utilizing a five point Likert scale was applied as a methodology to gather the required ratings on various lower-level personality traits. In total 775 Dutch speaking self-employed business owners in Belgium filled out the questionnaire. This data was collected through the Socratos survey system from iVox utilizing the member database of Zenito, a Belgian non-profit service organization aimed at self-employed business owners. The ratings for each personality trait were expressed as a weighted arithmetic mean and expressed as their distance to the mean to determine a positive or negative tendency to the respective trait. These were then attributed to their respective dimension of the Big Five personality trait framework and averaged out to determine which higher-level trait was the most dominant. The main findings of the paper indicate that self-employed assume to be seen as conscientious (distance to the mean 0.55); however, assume not to be seen as agreeable (distance to the mean – 0.24).