Introduction
1.1 Background Of The Study
Entrepreneurship is the ability to find and evaluate business opportunities, gather the necessary resources, initiate appropriate actions to ensure success and implement actions to take advantage of the opportunities for rewarding outcomes (Azubuike, 2006). The management school of entrepreneurship suggests that an entrepreneur is a person who organizes or manages a business undertaking, assuming the risk for the sake of profit (Webster, 1966). Within this perspective, it is believed that entrepreneurship can be developed through conscious learning. In most cases, failure in entrepreneurial activities is attributed to poor management tactics. It is therefore, averred that training in management functions can help reduce business failure substantially and make success of an enterprise. The leadership school of entrepreneurship sees an entrepreneur as someone who relies on those he believes can help him achieve his purposes and objectives. This school proposes that a successful entrepreneur must be a ‘people manager’, an effective leader, a mentor who motivates, directs and leads others to accomplish set tasks.
Kao (1989) postulates that the entrepreneur must be a leader, able to define a vision of what is possible, and attract people to rally around that vision and transform it into reality. The two major elements in this approach are; getting the task accomplished and responding to the needs of those involved in task accomplishment. Personality based model and human capital models are examples of character-based model. According to personality based model, entrepreneurs’ posses certain traits and these specific traits are expected to produce a strong impact on planning the business and on the choice of strategies and actions during the launching phase, which will in turn determine the entrepreneur’s eventual success in the undertaking.
In particular psychological but also economic research has analyzed in detail which personality characteristics are fundamental for entrepreneurial success. The following traits have been defined as useful in explaining the past success and in predicting the future development of a newly founded business; motivational traits, such as need for achievement, internal locus of control, and need for autonomy, cognitive skills such as problem-solving orientation, tolerance of ambiguity, creativity and risk-taking propensity, effective personality traits, such as stress resistance, emotional stability, and level of arousal, and social skills, such as interpersonal reactivity and assertiveness (Caliendo and Kritikos, 2007).
In entrepreneurial companies, visions might be more important than in bigger organizations because of the relative close contact between entrepreneur and employee (Baum et al., 1998). Thus, goals and visions have an effect on the performance of small companies A General Model of Entrepreneurial SuccessA general interdisciplinary model for entrepreneurial success is the Giessen- Amsterdam model of entrepreneurial success. The model shows that all of the influences of personality, human capital, and environment on success have to be mediated by strategies and tactics of actions. This concept is in stark contrast to theoretical stance of the ecological approach which assumes that essentially a random process of actions is shaped and selected by the environment, including the function of the environment to produce certain failure and success rates. The research therefore seeks to provide an appraisal of success criteria for entrepreneurship business in Nigeria.
1.2 Statement Of The Problem
The growing importance of entrepreneurship in terms of constituting a sector of employment generation and economic building necessitates that entrepreneurial businesses should have the capacity to grow, make profit and contribute to the nation’s economic development.
Entrepreneurship is the capacity and willingness to develop, organize and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit. The most obvious example of entrepreneurship is the starting of new businesses. In economics, entrepreneurship combined with land, labor, natural resources and capital can produce profit. Entrepreneurial spirit is characterized by innovation and risk-taking, and is an essential part of a nation’s ability to succeed in an ever changing and increasingly competitive global marketplace.
However, evidence shows that many entrepreneurs lack the capacity, trait, and resources to manage their businesses to grow, make profit and contribute to nations building, as such many entrepreneurial businesses have started and later folded up.
Therefore the problem confronting this research work is to provide an appraisal of success criteria for entrepreneurship business in Nigeria with a particular reference to De-Prince Supermarket, Gbangada Kosofe, Lagos.
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