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From sibship to entrepreneurship: an intragenerational perspective on entrepreneurial intention and action

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Abstract

People’s entrepreneurial intention and action largely depend on their development and acquisition of entrepreneurial capital, including human, social, and financial capital. Extant research has adopted an intergenerational perspective, emphasizing that entrepreneurial capital can be transferred from parents and grandparents to offspring. We advance this literature by introducing an intragenerational perspective and arguing that siblings affect one’s development and acquisition of entrepreneurial capital. Siblings enhance social capital development through mutual learning, hinder human capital development because parental resource dilution harms cognitive advancement, and facilitate financial capital acquisition via lending and co-funding. In combination, these effects result in an inverted U-shaped relationship between sibship size and entrepreneurial intention and a positive and concave relationship between sibship size and entrepreneurial action. We also argue that men obtain more combined entrepreneurial capital from siblings than do women due to their parents’ son preference, shifting the inflection points of these curved relationships to the right for men. We analyze data on 6,048 individuals (16–60 years old) and find general evidence for these notions.

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Notes

  1. Although siblings may compete for parents’ capital, a larger portion of financial capital for entrepreneurship comes from the extended family (Li & Wu, 2018). The larger the number of siblings an individual has, the more extended family members from which the individual can acquire financial capital as the siblings grow up.

  2. The opposite possibility, that a moderate level of sibship leads to the lowest level of human and social capital, requires that: (1) the relationship between sibship size and human capital development is U-shaped, or (2) the relationship between sibship size and social capital development is U-shaped. However, the literature on sibship size has largely concluded that both relationships are linear, though the first is negative while the second is positive. Therefore, the opposite possibility is rather unlikely.

  3. Respondents who were already entrepreneurs were likely to have a high level of entrepreneurial intention, given that entrepreneurial action often results from well-formed intention (Krueger et al., 2000). For our survey of non-entrepreneurs (i.e., those who had not founded or operated a business but might have formed an entrepreneurial intention), we tested the effect of sibship size on their entrepreneurial intention measured by the Likert scale (Linan & Chen, 2009) and found qualitatively identical results.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Gary Bruton, Ronald K. Mitchell, J. Robert Mitchell, and Laszlo Tihanyi for their valuable feedback for an early version of the paper.

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  1. China Europe International Business School, 699 Hongfeng Road, Shanghai, China

    Taiyuan Wang

  2. Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, 777 Guoding Road, Shanghai, China

    Jie Cao & Nan Lin

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Wang, T., Cao, J. & Lin, N. From sibship to entrepreneurship: an intragenerational perspective on entrepreneurial intention and action. Asia Pac J Manag (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-022-09867-0

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