Effects Of Social Capital On The Identification And Development Of Entrepreneurial Opportunities Entrepreneur Relationship

Entrepreneurship has become an important driving force that gives a great contribution to wealth growth of Chinese economy. With the degree of opening of Chinese market, more and more people choose to start new businesses. On one hand, the contradiction between the huge army of graduates flock to the job market every year and the limited position providing force large part to start their own businesses. Unfortunately, duo to the lack of social resources, the vast majority of entrepreneurs are leading to failure. Acquire the access to resources through the network of social relations become the key issue whether the new enterprise can successfully survive and develop.Social capital theory are widely applied by scholars to the field of entrepreneurship research. In particular, the relationship between the strong and weak ties in the social capital research has always been a hot academic field content. However, to explain the role of strong and weak ties, different scholars give the controversial conclusions. Moreover, as an important dimension of relational social capital, trust received little attention. This paper argues that to solve the controversy between strong ties and weak ties, we have to distinguish the different stages in the entrepreneurship process and uncover the role of trust in the business. Therefore, based on the literature review, we argue that strong ties and weak ties play the differential role in the process of entrepreneurship. Besides, in the relationship between the ties strength and entrepreneurial opportunities, affective trust and cognitive trust also plays an important and differential role. Specifically, this article assumes that strong ties and weak ties are positive influence on the discovery and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities, where strong ties effect on opportunity discovery and development is completed mediated by affective trust and the effect of weak ties on the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities are positively moderated by cognitive trust.In order to verify our theoretical assumptions, we conduct an empirical survey of239entrepreneurs. We used hierarchical regression analysis to verify the causal relationship between the various variables. Results show that (1) the strong ties and weak ties play an important role in promoting opportunity discovery;(2) strong ties are positively influence the entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation whereas weak ties show no influence;(3) strong ties effect on opportunity discovery and development is completed mediated by affective trust;(4) the effect of weak ties on the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities are positively moderated by cognitive trust. Subsequently, we further explain why weak ties do not work in entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation. Finally, this paper also discusses the theoretical and practical significance of the study, limitations and future research directions.