Altruistic entrepreneurs: How does religious belief affect entrepreneurial career persistence?

Ying Chen, Kim Klyver and Hui Zhang

Journal of Small Business Management, 2024, vol. 62, issue 5, 2638-2669

Abstract: This article investigates the influence of entrepreneurs’ religious beliefs on entrepreneurial career persistence, with altruism as a mediating mechanism at the psychological level. Based on the theory of role boundary permeability, we propose that the moral values contained in entrepreneurs’ religious beliefs permeate into their entrepreneurial domain, making them more altruistic. Using a unique longitudinal, multilevel dataset derived from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we tested our hypotheses on 4,848 observations of entrepreneurs’ career persistence spanning three consecutive two-year periods (2012−2014, 2014−2016, and 2016−2018) using multilevel logistic regression. Our findings show that religious beliefs enhance entrepreneurial altruism and subsequently increase the probability of entrepreneurial career persistence. More broadly, our study provides new insights into the psychological-level mechanisms at work in the entrepreneurial practice of religious entrepreneurs, adding an important new explanation to the limited research on how religion matters for entrepreneurship.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00472778.2023.2248496 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ujbmxx:v:62:y:2024:i:5:p:2638-2669

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ujbm20

DOI: 10.1080/00472778.2023.2248496

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Small Business Management is currently edited by Eric Liguori

More articles in Journal of Small Business Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().