Desirable Features of a Successful Entrepreneur: The Perspective of Family and Non-Family Firms

to establish which features of an entrepreneur are considered more favourable in family businesses than in non-family businesses. Our results demonstrate that for family entrepreneurs, features connected with sustaining long-term survival are more vital than for non-family businesses. Moreover, skills which may be useful in developing social capital – for example, negotiation skills and creating business relations – are more important in non-fam - ily firms, which is contrary to the assumption provided in the literature review. however, the evaluation of the results gained in this study indicates that in order to sustain their competitive advantages, family downplay the role of social skills and should become less risk-averse, as risk-taking can sometimes be the only way to ensure survival in the market.


Introduction
The traits and skills of a successful entrepreneur may differ between businesses. In family enterprises, where at least two systems -family and business -meet, the desirable characteristics of a good entrepreneur are different from those in non-family Pobrane z czasopisma Annales H -Oeconomia http://oeconomia.annales.umcs.pl Data: 09/07/2020 11:34:00 U M C S businesses. As our research demonstrates, entrepreneurs in family irms are more likely to favour leaders who are long-term orientated, and they are more sceptical about leaders with a higher appetite for risk. This attitude towards entrepreneurial characteristics is crucial when considering succession. We can assume that in family irms, the preparation of potential successors can be targeted to speciic characteristics in order to improve or develop the desirable features of a successful entrepreneur. The main goal of our paper is to establish which features of an entrepreneur are considered more favourable in family businesses than in non-family businesses. As far as we know, this topic is yet to be examined in Poland.

Literature review
According to Bull and Willard [1993], existing research on entrepreneurship theory can be divided into ive categories. The irst category is connected with the problems of deining an "entrepreneur", while the second examines the psychological traits of an entrepreneur, and the third explores the successful strategies of new and already existing ventures. The fourth concerns the formation of new ventures, and, inally, the ifth category discusses the inluence of the environment on entrepreneurial actions. This paper focuses on the traits and skills of an entrepreneur, as his/her role is also one of the most important issues in the modern theory of irms [Casson, 2005].
Traits of successful entrepreneurs were the subject of interest of early entrepreneurship research [Brockhaus, 1980]. In the studies conducted among new venture inanciers and entrepreneurs, personal characteristics were identiied as the main reasons for success [Sexton, 2001;. Personal qualities, personality traits and talents of entrepreneurs have also been researched by McClelland [1961] and Joyce and Gomathi [2010]. This trend has been renewed by researchers who are more psychology orientated and focus more on entrepreneurs' competencies, motivation, cognition and behaviour [Baron, 1998;Baum et al., 1998;Busenitz Barney, 1997;Mitchell et al., 2000].
This approach seems to be logical, since successful entrepreneurs must know how to search for, acquire and link speciic resources, even while conquering new markets, and meeting resource shortages, and in situations of extreme uncertainty [Bhide, 2000;Stevenson, 1985]. This is why our research considers both innate features and acquired skills.
We assume that the perception of entrepreneurial traits and skills will differ between family and non-family irms. Family businesses' duality, which stems from the coexistence of two systems -family and business -has an impact on their strategy, governance, human resources and succession [Basco, Perez Rodriguez, 2009]. The signiicance of non-inancial goals in family irms is well covered in the subject literature [Chua et al., 1999;Zellweger, Astrachan, 2008]. A family business is orientated towards the realisation of goals such as the long-term survival of the company, ensuring jobs and incomes for family members, and promoting family values, including corporate social responsibility activities and meeting their emotional needs [Węcławski, 2014]. The functioning of a family business relies on the assumption of its long-term preservation and transgenerational transfer of values.
The results of numerous empirical studies reveal that for family enterprises, preserving economic independence has signiicant meaning. The family, as the owner of the irm, makes every effort to transfer it to the next generation [Anderson, Reeb, 2003]. This observation indicates that, in evaluating the traits necessary for entrepreneurs, family irms may prefer those which are helpful when ensuring their survival. This fact can also be important in terms of planning future succession. From these insights, we formulated the irst hypothesis: h1: Family irms are more likely than non-family irms to treat as important those traits and skills of entrepreneurs which support a long-term orientation (persistence, forecasting skills and the ability to share knowledge).
According to resource-based theory [Wernerfelt, 1984], in order to create competitive advantage, irms should possess a bundle of unique and valuable tangible and intangible resources. This framework is used by many authors from the ield of family businesses, as it can explain the "familiness effect" inluence on irm performance [Chrisman et al., 2005;Dyer, 2006;Sirmon, hitt, 2003]. The family has an impact on the social capital of the company, which involves relationships between entities. Arregle et al. [2007] present examples of research where strong interactions between clients, bankers, suppliers and family irms are shown. Moreover, family irms are believed to have a better reputation [Deephouse, Jaskiewicz, 2013]. naldi et al. [2013] argue that sustaining the family image and reputation is a speciic objective of the family enterprise, which underlies the preservation of socio-emotional wealth. For Miller and Le Breton-Miller [2006], building social capital in the form of ensuring long-term relations with outsiders is a display of prospective stewardship. Family business owners interested in transferring their business to subsequent generations are more determined to smooth the way for successors and prepare good relations with their suppliers, major clients and community. Thus, family irms strive to be trustworthy partners and to develop and maintain trusting relationships with stakeholders. From these insights, we formulated the second hypothesis: h2: Family irms are more likely than non-family irms to treat as important those traits and skills of entrepreneurs which are connected to developing their social capital (ease of creating business relations, negotiation skills).
Another issue which can have an impact on the perception of desirable entrepreneurial traits is attitude towards risk. Family business owners are believed to Pobrane z czasopisma Annales H -Oeconomia http://oeconomia.annales.umcs.pl Data: 09/07/2020 11:34:00 U M C S be particularly risk-averse [Memili et al., 2011]. This aversion may be caused by the concern that the survival of the irm is threatened. In the subject literature, it is described as one of the signs of a stagnation perspective [Miller et al., 2008] and is said to be the result of family secrecy and stability requirements. Other authors claim that it is a result of family irms prioritising harmony and the maintenance of the founder's heritage [Mitchell et al., 2011]. however, along with the socio-emotional wealth approach, a family business approach towards risk changes between risk-aversion in steady-state situations and risk-taking when external hazards occur [Minichilli et al., 2015]. On this basis, we propose that: h3: Family irms are less likely than non-family irms to evaluate the propensity to take risks as the trait of a good entrepreneur.

Methods used
During the period from April to May 2016, we conducted quantitative research among 197 small and medium enterprises located in Lubelskie voivodeship (the survey was submitted to 8,500 companies, but only 2.59% of them responded). We asked them about their evaluation of their operating conditions and their opinions about entrepreneurship. One part of our questionnaire was dedicated entirely to the issue of good entrepreneurial traits -speciically, abilities and skills. All interviews were conducted using paper and pen personal interview (PAPI) and computer-assisted web interview (CAWI) techniques. The direct respondents were entrepreneurs. The sample relects the proportion of types of economic activity in the tested population. A chi-square test revealed that the number of enterprises in each economic activity category was not signiicantly different from the actual structure of the population for the tested region -chi 2 (4, n = 197) = 8,24; p-value n.s.s.
From this sample, we chose only those answers which were given by enterprises where at least one person other than the owner was employed. This is consistent with Barry's [1975] deinition of a family enterprise, which, "in practice, is controlled by the members of a single family". Enterprises declaring that only one person was engaged in business activity were not considered family businesses. Our inal sample included 155 enterprises; among them, 83 were declared as family businesses. The average age of the examined companies was 13.4 years (family irms -14.5 years; non-family -12.1 years). The interviewed businesses were managed mostly by women (the average share of women in management was 62%: 55% in family irms and 73% in non-family irms). On average, they employed seven workers (family irms -5; non-family -11).
In order to conirm the formulated hypotheses (h1, h2, h3), the binary logistic method was used. This method was applied because our dependent variable (y 1type of enterprise) is dichotomous (0 means "non-family irm"; 1 means "family irm") and the interpretation of the results gained is clear and readable [Tranmer, Elliot, 2008].
We introduced 16 explanatory variables, which describe the importance of the desired features: creativity (x 1 ), responsibility (x 2 ), self-discipline (x 3 ), ambition (x 4 ), persistence (x 5 ), diligence (x 6 ), self-conidence (x 7 ), propensity to take risks (x 8 ), and skills of an entrepreneur, comprising leadership skills (x 9 ), quick decision-making ability (x 10 ), analytical skills (x 11 ), forecasting skills (x 12 ), ease of creating business relations (x 13 ), ability to deal with stress (x 14 ), negotiation skills (x 15 ), and the ability to share knowledge (x 16 ). All were coded on a 5-point Likert scale (ranging from 1 -"barely important" to 5 -"very important"). The controls used were the number of employees (x 19 ), age of the enterprise (x 18 ), and women's share in management (x 17 ). The descriptive analyses of given variables are presented in Table 1. In order to check the relations between explanatory variables, Pearson's correlation coeficients were calculated for each pair. All independent variables were entered into a binary regression model. The model was tested with the hosmer-Lemenshow goodness-of-it (p-value 0.428). The value of nagelkerke R 2 estimated for this model means that it is able to explain 47.1% of the variation based on the given variables.  x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x 10 x 11 x 12 x 13 x 14 x 15 x 16 x 17 x 18 x 19 x

Results
Creating a logit regression model allowed us to distinguish which entrepreneur traits are more likely to be considered vital for a family business and which are considered vital for a non-family business. As presented in Table 3 the signiicant factors considered more important for family enterprises are persistence (x 5 ), leadership skills (x 9 ) and forecasting skills (x 12 ). The higher the evaluated importance of these variables, the higher the likelihood that the evaluation has been made by a family enterprise. In light of this inding, we can partially conirm the irst hypothesis that family irms are more likely than non-family irms to treat as important those traits and skills of entrepreneurs which can support a long-term orientation. The features which can ensure the long-term survival of an enterprise, such as the entrepreneur's persistence (x 5 ) or forecasting skills (x 12 ), were also signiicant in our model. nevertheless, we found the importance of the ability to share knowledge (x 16 ) to be insigniicant; this is a variable we assumed to be more common in family irms. Our third hypothesis is also conirmed. The lower the reported importance of propensity to take risks (x 8 ), the more likely it is to be the opinion of a family irm. In addition, family irm representatives evaluated this feature as the least important among all the other traits and skills of an entrepreneur (Table 1). The low impor-Pobrane z czasopisma Annales H -Oeconomia http://oeconomia.annales.umcs.pl Data: 09/07/2020 11:34:00 U M C S tance of this feature as declared by all entrepreneurs, especially from family irms, stems from regarding risk as the possibility that something bad may happen rather than as an opportunity that something good may happen. nevertheless, it is worth noting that this negative risk perception can become an obstacle for a family irm's development. According to Kellermanns et al. [2008], risk-aversion, stagnation, or strategic comfort zones represent status quo behaviours that are typical for enterprises in which entrepreneurial behaviours are diminished.
Our most interesting inding is that the higher evaluation of those traits and skills connected with developing social capital in enterprise (importance of negotiation skills -x 15 , and ease of creating business relations -x 13 ) is more likely in non-family irms. This result discredits our second hypothesis, which we formulated based upon insights from the literature. nevertheless, we can suggest a few explanations for this phenomenon. Firstly, entrepreneurs from family irms may rely on their companies' social capital to such an extent that they do not see the need to have any speciic highly developed social skills. This issue can become an interesting research subject, given the fact that entrepreneurs may be founders as well as successors of businesses (though this aspect was not covered in the present survey). Secondly, family irm representatives may think that building social capital is not determined so much by "learnable" skills but rather by intrinsic features of the company, such as family goodwill. This topic requires more complex research in order to uncover its actual reasons.
Another interesting result is that entrepreneurs who place greater importance on leadership skills (x 9 ) are more likely to operate in a family irm. We did not incorporate this aspect into our hypotheses, but we can suppose that this result is also associated with the "familiness" effect visible in human capital in family enterprises (i.e. conlicts between family and non-family employees).

Limitations
Our research was carried out in Lubelskie voivodeship, which is considered the poorest region in Poland, based on it having the lowest GDP per capita. In order to obtain more widely applicable results, we should conduct our survey on a country-wide scale and with a random sample. nevertheless, the present study indicates that perceiving the business challenges and required abilities and traits to run a business successfully are different in family and non-family irms.

Conclusions
As our results demonstrate, the desirable features of an entrepreneur vary between family and non-family businesses. For family entrepreneurs, features connected with sustaining long-term survival are more vital than for non-family businesses. The ability to share knowledge is considered one of the least important variables in both company categories. Moreover, skills which may be useful in developing social capital -for example, negotiation skills and creating business relations -are more important in non-family irms, which is contrary to the assumption provided in the literature review. The propensity to take risks is the least desirable trait of entrepreneurs in family irms, which is in line with our belief that family business goals are relected in their perception of a successful entrepreneur. Thanks to this study, we can assume what requirements a potential successor should fulil in order to be ready to take over the leadership of a family irm. however, the evaluation of the results gained in this study indicates that in order to sustain their competitive advantages, family irms should not downplay the role of social skills and should become less risk-averse, as risk-taking can sometimes be the only way to ensure survival in the market.