The personality traits that define entrepreneurs have been of significant interest to academic research for several decades. However, previous studies have used vastly different definitions of the term “entrepreneur”, meaning their subjects have ranged from rural farmers to tech-industry start-up founders. Consequently, most research has investigated disparate sub-types of entrepreneurs, which may not allow for inferences to be made regarding the general entrepreneurial population. Despite this, studies have frequently extrapolated results from narrow sub-types to entrepreneurs in general. This variation in entrepreneur samples reduces the comparability of empirical studies and calls into question the reviews that pool results without systematic differentiation between sub-types. The present study offers a novel account by differentiating between the definitions of “entrepreneur” used in studies on entrepreneurs’ personality traits. We conduct a systematic literature review across 95 studies from 1985 to 2020. We uncover three main themes across the previous studies. First, previous research applied a wide range of definitions of the term “entrepreneur”. Second, we identify several inconsistent findings across studies, which may at least partially be due to the use of heterogeneous entrepreneur samples. Third, the few studies that distinguished between various types of entrepreneurs revealed differences between them. Our systematic differentiation between entrepreneur sub-types and our research integration offer a novel perspective that has, to date, been widely neglected in academic research. Future research should use clearly defined entrepreneurial samples and conduct more systematic investigations into the differences between entrepreneur sub-types.

几十年来，定义企业家的人格特质引起了学术研究的极大兴趣。但是，以前的研究对“企业家”一词使用了截然不同的定义，这意味着他们的研究对象从农村农民到科技行业的创业者不等。因此，大多数研究调查了不同类型的企业家，这可能无法推断出一般企业家群体。尽管如此，研究通常将狭窄子类型的结果推广到一般企业家。企业家样本中的这种差异降低了实证研究的可比性，并质疑汇集结果而没有亚型之间系统性区分的评论。通过区分企业家人格特质研究中使用的“企业家”的定义，本研究提供了一个新颖的解释。从1985年到2020年，我们对95项研究进行了系统的文献综述。我们发现了先前研究中的三个主要主题。首先，先前的研究对“企业家”一词进行了广泛的定义。其次，我们在研究中发现了一些不一致的发现，这可能至少部分是由于使用了异类企业家样本所致。第三，少数区分各种类型企业家的研究揭示了它们之间的差异。我们对企业家子类型和我们的研究整合之间的系统区分提供了一种新颖的观点，迄今为止，这一观点在学术研究中已被广泛忽略。