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Our purpose in this paper is to provide a comprehensive examination of recent research into individual differences in order to better understand the future promise of self-leadership as a concept and a research subject for entrepreneur ship. We briefly present a description of self-leadership research and then proceed to describe and contrast the self-leadership concept relative to other related motivational and self-influence constructs including: optimism, happiness, psychological flow, consciousness, personality models, self-monitoring, the need for autonomy, emotional intelligence, and diversity factors including age, gender, and cultural differences, and the work-life interface. We relate these concepts to entrepreneur ship, and conclude with suggestions for future research on the relationships between self-leadership, individual differences, and entrepreneurship.
The concept of self-leadership (Manz, 1986; Manz & Neck, 2004) represents an individual level process perspective through which men and women influence themselves to control their own actions and thinking. The goal of increased self-leadership for entrepreneurs is for these individuals to more effectively lead themselves by learning and applying specific behavioral and cognitive strategies to improve their lives and their entrepreneurial business ventures. We propose that the process of selfleadership is inherent in successful entrepreneurship and can be developed by both nascent entrepreneurs just beginning a business and veteran entrepreneurs who may be struggling with taking their businesses to higher achievements in sales growth and firm profitability.
Self-leadership was first developed and proposed by Manz (1983; 1986) as an extension of self-management theory (Manz, 1990, Manz & Sims, 1980, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1994). Over the past two decades, the self-leadership concept has been extensively written about as evidenced by the large number of practitioner oriented selfleadership books and articles on the subject (e.g., Blanchard, 1995; Cashman, 1995; Manz, 1991; Manz & Sims, 2001; Sims & Manz, 1996; Waitley, 1995). This article will begin with a brief overview of the self-leadership research (see Neck & Houghton, 2006, for an extensive research review and discussion of selfleadership) and then proceed to discuss how recent research on individual differences can extend our understanding of self-leadership within the broader research context of entrepreneurship.
Although there are many similarities in the general entrepreneurship process within the new venture process including initial startups, struggling or rapidly growing small businesses, and large corporations, there are also...