ROLE OF PERSONALITY IN INTENTION TO ADOPT SOCIAL MEDIA: A STUDY OF ENTREPRENEURS

Abstract

The growing reliance on social media as a strategic tool for entrepreneurial ventures has intensified academic interest in understanding the determinants of its adoption. However, existing research on social media adoption has largely relied on technology-centric or performance-oriented models and has tended to treat personality traits and entrepreneurial traits as separate explanatory constructs, often assuming direct effects on adoption behaviour. Moreover, limited attention has been given to the cognitive mechanisms through which individual traits influence adoption decisions, particularly in entrepreneurial and SME contexts. Addressing these theoretical and methodological gaps, the present study investigates the role of personality and entrepreneurial traits in shaping entrepreneurs‟ intention to adopt social media, with Perceived Innovation Characteristics of Social Media (PICSM) conceptualised as a key mediating mechanism. The study adopts a sequential mixed-methods research design, integrating an exploratory qualitative phase with an explanatory quantitative phase. The qualitative phase employed in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs to explore their lived experiences, identify salient personality and entrepreneurial traits, and understand how social media is perceived as an innovation. Importantly, this phase led to the identification of consistency as a distinct entrepreneurial capability, emerging beyond traditional personality frameworks, while neuroticism did not emerge as a salient or explanatory trait in the entrepreneurial context. Insights from the qualitative findings informed the development of an integrated conceptual framework and the contextual scale development of entrepreneurial traits and PICSM. The quantitative phase utilised survey data from 702 entrepreneurs and applied Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) to validate the measurement scales and test the hypothesised relationships. Mediation analysis was conducted, followed by post hoc analyses including Importance-Performance Map Analysis (IPMA), Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA), and Combined IPMA (cIPMA) to identify high-impact and necessary traits. The findings reveal that while personality traits provide a psychological foundation, entrepreneurial traits exert a more immediate and practically significant influence on social media adoption intentions. Crucially, the results demonstrate that the influence of both personality and entrepreneurial traits on adoption operates primarily through PICSM, establishing it as a central mediating construct. Trait-level mediation results indicate that innovativeness, creativity, openness, resilience, agreeableness, extraversion, risk-taking, self-efficacy, and the newly identified trait of consistency significantly influence social media adoption intentions through PICSM. Post hoc analyses further show that social media adoption among entrepreneurs is a staged psychological process, vi wherein certain traits-particularly consistency and innovativeness-function as critical and necessary conditions at higher levels of adoption. The study makes several important contributions. Theoretically, it advances entrepreneurship and digital adoption literature by integrating personality and entrepreneurial traits into a single, context-sensitive framework, thereby refining trait based explanations of entrepreneurial behaviour and supporting arguments that traditional personality models should be complemented by capability-driven and behavioural consistency perspectives. It also extends Diffusion of Innovation Theory by empirically demonstrating that perceived innovation characteristics are shaped by individual traits, elevating PICSM as a key linkage between personality, entrepreneurial capabilities, and adoption intention. Methodologically, the study contributes by developing and validating contextually grounded measurement scales, including consistency as a novel entrepreneurial trait, suitable for entrepreneurship research in emerging-economy contexts. Practically, the findings offer actionable insights for entrepreneurs, educators, policymakers, and platform designers. The results indicate that successful social media adoption is not primarily dependent on inherent personality dispositions, but rather on developable entrepreneurial capabilities, particularly innovativeness, creativity, resilience, self-efficacy, and consistency. Entrepreneurship educators and incubators are therefore encouraged to shift training programs from personality-based interventions toward capability-building, behavioural discipline, and innovation-oriented skill development. Policymakers aiming to promote SME digitalisation can leverage these insights to design interventions that reduce perceived complexity and enhance compatibility and usefulness perceptions. Finally, social media platform designers can utilise these findings to create features, onboarding processes, and support services that align more closely with entrepreneurs‟ innovation perceptions and behavioural routines, thereby facilitating broader and more inclusive adoption.