Entrepreneurial deviance as bright and dark character virtues: the Harry Potter study

Abstract

Despite its centrality to entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial deviance remains poorly understood and hard to capture empirically. This study offers a fresh, character-oriented perspective, proposing that deviance may stem from deeper, but fundamentally different, personality structures. Drawing on a fiction-based personality typology from the Harry Potter saga, we use machine-learning methods to transform this typology into measurable constructs. We analyze large-scale data from the TIME Magazine Harry Potter Quiz at the regional level (N = 795,829) and a two-wave individual-level replication and extension study (N = 820). We consistently find that Gryffindor and Slytherin character types, capturing bright and dark forms of deviance, jointly predict entrepreneurial outcomes. These effects persist even when accounting for established entrepreneurial personality profiles. Our findings underscore the conceptual and empirical value of viewing entrepreneurial deviance through the lens of character diversity and equifinality. Both heroic and self-serving forms of deviance may play constructive roles in entrepreneurship, inviting renewed reflection on the moral complexity of entrepreneurial personality and behavior.