Risk-taking propensity is considered a defining characteristic of entrepreneurs. Previous research informs us that risk-taking propensity can be dynamic, changing over the course of an individual’s life, often in response to situational changes. Despite this, temporally driven shifts in entrepreneurs’ risk-taking propensity have been underappreciated by research to date. While some studies investigate risk-taking propensity variation across entrepreneurs in early venture phases, risk-taking propensity differences across all venture phases have not been investigated. To close this gap, we assess variations in risk-taking propensity across groups of entrepreneurs in different venture phases, ranging from early to late stages. In a sample of 266 practicing entrepreneurs, we observe notable differences in risk-taking propensity across venture phases. Early-stage entrepreneurs exhibit higher risk-taking propensity than those in later phases of venture maturity. This has important implications for entrepreneurship research and encourages the consideration of temporal personality variation and differences within the group of entrepreneurs.

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 subtypes 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.