Demographics and personal characteristics of urban Malaysian entrepreneurs: an ethnic comparison

The study attempts to investigate whether becoming an entrepreneur is characterised by entrepreneur's personality characteristics. In addition, it attempts to explore the differences between two ethnic groups, namely, Malay and Chinese, with regard to entrepreneur personality, family background and company background. Four demographic variables, three business characteristics variables and six personality variables were found to be significantly different across ethnic groups. Overall, in terms of entrepreneurial personality characteristics, both Malay and Chinese entrepreneurs scored high with respect to the Pursuit of Excellence; moderately high on Work Ethics; moderate on Dominance, Mastery, and Internal Attributing and moderately lower on Powerful Others and Chance Attributing dimensions. The Pursuit of Excellence dimension was statistically significant different across the groups. The rest were statistically not significant. Some interesting results were that Malays derive satisfaction from working hard and seeing the job well done as compared to the Chinese and that Chinese enjoy having power over people as compared to the Malays. The implications of the study are also discussed along with some recommendations.