Meeting entrepreneurs’ expectations: the importance of social skills in strong relationships

ABSTRACT

In this study, we are interested in whether and when individuals’ ability to interact with others influences their tendency to provide social support to nascent entrepreneurs. We argue that social skills are not only necessary for entrepreneurs to obtain resources but also important for those people (alters) providing entrepreneurs with support, and especially so in strong relationships. We argue that in strong relationships, expectations of social support exchange pressure potential support providers to provide support in order to meet those expectations. Empirically, we found an association between social skills and exchange of social support, dependent on the strength of the relationship between the resource provider and the nascent entrepreneur. The hypotheses were tested on a dataset containing 458 individuals who know a nascent entrepreneur in Denmark.

KEYWORDS:

• Nascent entrepreneur
• social support
• social skills
• tie strength

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge valuable feedback on previous versions of the manuscript from William B. Gartner, Benson Honig, Suna Løwe Nielsen, Pekka Stenholm, and participants at Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (2015) and the Paper Development Workshop at University of Southern Denmark (2017).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark 10-080201