Research On Social Capital On Entrepreneurial Decision-Making

The significance of entrepreneurship and its impact on each aspect of the society has drawn extensive attention recently, while entrepreneurial decision-making (EDM), the most relevant concept, is becoming scholars'main interest. Under the background of a relationship-embedded society like China, social capital (SC) places great influence on EDM. So if the relationship between SC and EDM could be clearly stated, there would be a great progress on theory development and business practices. Under this background, two research questions are raised, first, what are the key factors during the EDM process; second, how SC can influence EDM.Based on the "social learning theory", we conducted a conceptual framework aimed to explain the mechanism of how SC influences EDM. Under this framework, entrepreneurial self-efficacy's(ESE) mediating effect as well as risk propensity's(RP) moderating effect was examined. This study adopted a quasi-experimental design, and the research samples are business and economics students who are expected to graduate within 1-2 years,both undergraduate and graduate.300 questionnaires were distributed, with 221 valid collections. Through data analysis tools like coefficient analysis and regression analysis, we come out findings as follow.First, the decision of starting a new venture is positively related with three cognitive factors, which are external environment evaluation, internal capacity assessment, and future outcome expectation. Second,external environment evaluation, internal capacity assessment, and future outcome expectation are positively associated with helpful weak ties, but not supportive or strong ties. Third, ESE was proved to perfectly mediate the relationship between helpful weak ties and all the three cognitive factors. Four, RP was proved to have moderating effect on the relationship between ESE and external environment evaluation.This article provides a new perspective regarding the research on EDM, explained what resource-based theories are not able to. Furthermore, the findings are valuable reference for entrepreneurial practitioners and policy makers.However, there are still some limitations in this study. Researches can make further more progress by adopting a longitudinal design, optimizing the scenario development, enhancing sample diversities, and putting more efforts on theory localization.