Study of the Relationship between Entrepreneurial Personality Characteristics and Islamic Moral Components

An important and fundamental issue in Islamic discussions is ethics as one of the most challenging topics in management. More importantly, some recent researches in the field of entrepreneurship have explored the area of ethics in entrepreneurship. These studies are generally divided into three categories of "ethical entrepreneurship", "entrepreneurial ethics", and "influence of ethics on entrepreneurship". The third category that has received less attention is the effect of moral values on entrepreneur's abilities. As since the research done so far in this field is scarce and there is little evidence for the Islamic moral components, attempt is made to identify the most important moral components that Islam has emphasized in entrepreneurship and then measure their correlation with entrepreneurial personality characteristics. Thus two questionnaires containing 23 questions for measuring entrepreneurial characteristics and 30 questions for measuring moral components were used. The statistical community of this study was the students of the higher education centers in the Province of Qom with over forty thousand people and a sample of 137 persons was selected. The results of data analysis showed that some entrepreneurial characteristics such as internal controls, need to succeed, and tolerance of failure have a meaningful relationship with many of the moral components such as efforts, opportunities, and responsibility. Finally, an adaptive conceptual model covering the entrepreneurial personality characteristics and Islamic moral components was obtained.