Personality and entrepreneurial, professional and leadership motivations

•We study personality and entrepreneurial, professional and leadership motivations.•Those motivated for entrepreneurship and leadership seem more similar than different.•Professional motivation is predicted by a different set of personality traits.•Findings have implications for trait theories and the development of professionals.

Using a new framework that includes entrepreneurship, professionalism and professionalism as different dimensions of subjective career space, we investigated whether different kinds of people are motivated towards entrepreneurial as compared to organizational leadership or specialized professional work-roles. Correlations from two samples of 396 and 272 undergraduates indicate personality traits have more similar relationships with both entrepreneurial and leadership than with professional work-role motivations. Specifically, while the Big Five personality traits, low risk aversion and proactive personality correlate with entrepreneurial and leadership motivations, high risk aversion correlate with the motivation for more vocationally-based, professional work. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicate that whether proactive personality and risk aversion add to the prediction of entrepreneurial, professional and leadership motivations beyond the Big Five depends on the Big Five measure used and sampling differences. Overall, this study fills a gap in the comparative appreciation of the role of traits in leadership and entrepreneurial emergence, which has resulted from the historic separation of both research fields, and has implications for the entrepreneurial and/or leadership development of professionals in organizations.