Does entrepreneurs’ psychology affect their business venture success? Empirical findings from North Africa

This paper discusses the effect of psychological traits on success. We empirically explore the effect of entrepreneurs’ psychological biases on their venture success. Using a sample of Tunisian entrepreneurs and the cognitive mapping technique, our results indicate that psychology does affect business venture success. Especially, the entrepreneurial overconfidence and optimism biases can largely affect the new venture success. However, other variables, such as capital and social networks, also have strong effects on new venture success in this country. We control for gender differences and their effects on our empirical findings. For this purpose, we divide our full sample to constitute two sub-samples using the entrepreneur’s gender. We find that the behavioral factors, especially overconfidence, optimism and hope, have a great impact on new venture launched by female entrepreneurs compared to male entrepreneurs. In fact, the success of new venture launched by male entrepreneurs is less affected by behavioral factors and only the overconfidence bias can have an influence and their new venture success remains dependent to their age, experience and education.