Passion and entrepreneurial performance: an empirical analysis of Italian SMEs.

For many decades, scientists have been working on various research to decipher the parts of success and give people the recipe for that. Over this time, not only the definition of success has changed significantly but also the factors we consider while trying to achieve the knowledge of triumph. Recent trends try to take into account more and more factors about personal traits and how it defines not only the propensity to become an entrepreneur but even their following achievements. Mental characteristics and health, personal formation, and education are more and more considered so we decide to focus on some of them regarding different approaches to such a definition as passion. How do young-age activities that individuals used to be passionate about define your current success? How about your present conditions? What sort of passion do you feel toward your own business? How it shapes its performance? Success and passion are our focus and we try to find some answers regarding their relationships. In our research, we focus on passion from different points of view. First, we consider the activities that future entrepreneurs used to be passionate about before they become real actors in the business scene. The link between personality and entrepreneurship is presented in many studies but we decide to look at the period when the formation of the personality is still going on. Sport and artistic activities at young ages form the future personal traits of people and thus considering these doings we wonder if they might be predictors to not only becoming a future entrepreneur but also becoming a successful one. It is a new page we try to open and write about how your previous ages might define your future. Additionally to that, we consider the education level and its moderation role in this relationship between young age activities and your performance as an entrepreneur. Second, we analyze passion impact from a well-elaborated existing theory point of view. To do so, we apply the Dualistic Model of Passion that was created by Vallerand and his teammates (2003) in which they present the two types of passion as harmonious and obsessive ones and measure entrepreneurial passion using the Passion scale. Additionally considering the direct effect on performance, we being motivated and inspired by previous studies decide to control the gender factor as a moderator for these categories of passion and success.