PERSONALITY TRAITS AND TOURISM-PRENEURSHIP TENDENCY OF HOSPITALITY AND TOURISM MANAGEMENT UNDERGRADUATES

This paper examined the relationship between the big five personality traits and tourism-preneurship tendency of undergraduate students of hospitality and tourism management, University of Port Harcourt. The study used a structured questionnaire. Multiple regressions analysis that allows for exploration of the interrelationship among sets of variables were adopted for the analysis of data collected. The researchers carefully screen the data in terms of missing values, influential outliers, normality, and multicollinearity using statistical package for social science (SPSS) software version 23 before proceeding with the analysis. The result shows that there is a positive and significant correlation between the five dimensions of personality traits and tourism-prenueuriship tendency (TPI) in respect to hospitality and tourism management undergraduate students, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria except for openness to experiences. The result further validates the proposed big-five personality traits and tourism-preneurship tendency model for hospitality and tourism management undergraduate students of the University of Port Harcourt. It also confirms contentiousness as making the strongest unique contribution to tourism-preneurship tendency of hospitality and tourism management undergraduate students, University of Port Harcourt, Choba, Nigeria. This study contributed to the body of knowledge in the tourism domain by authenticating the usage of the big five personality traits for predicting tourism-entrepreneurship tendency of hospitality and tourism management students in an emerging economy. Overall, this research contributes to knowledge of university student’s personality traits and their relations with tourism-entrepreneurship intention. It fills the gap of limited empirical studies on entrepreneurship and tourism management in emerging economies.