Buddhist Entrepreneurs, Managerial Attention Allocation, and New Ventures’ Access to External Resources

Abstract

New ventures are often short of resources crucial to their survival and development. This research sheds new light on how new ventures can obtain better access to external resources by analyzing a survey of a large sample of Chinese private entrepreneurs. We found that by comparison with their non-Buddhist counterparts, Chinese Buddhist entrepreneurs tend to give greater attention to external activities and have a higher chance of gaining sociopolitical legitimacy and therefore have a better chance of accessing external resources such as bank loans. Moreover, the indirect effect on bank loans of the amount of attention allocated to external activities by Chinese Buddhist entrepreneurs is weakened by lower government intervention and better development of intermediary agencies in regions where new ventures are located, largely due to Chinese Buddhist entrepreneurs’ reduced reliance on sociopolitical legitimacy to access external resources.