A Study of Entrepreneur’s Environmental Scanning Behavior and their Personality

Environmental scanning is the radar for success for entrepreneurs. (Brown and Weiner 1985) Past studies have found that entrepreneurs have preferences for different type of information and different information sources are used to scan business environment. As the result, entrepreneurs’ environmental scanning behavior becomes an interesting topic for Taiwanese scholar where SME has a significant role in the economic. More over, possible patterns for entrepreneurs’ environmental scanning behavior can be drawn. Entrepreneurs tend to obtain different personality traits compare with average employees, where unique entrepreneurs’ personality trait might be the cause of their environmental scanning behavior. The researcher attends to seek possible connection between those two variables. The result of this study has shown that older enterprises have wider environmental scope and frequent environmental scanning activities then younger enterprise. Also, entrepreneurs tend to favor informal personal sources then formal personal sources. However, their personality traits and environmental scanning behavior are not that different from the regular people and base on the research result, there are no connection between those two variables, personality traits and environmental scanning behavior.