Complementary or compensatory? A contingency perspective on how entrepreneurs’ human and social capital interact in shaping start-up progress

Abstract

Entrepreneurs can profit from both their human and social capital. However, research on how the two types of capital interact in shaping relevant outcomes has produced inconclusive results. Attempting to explain the inconsistencies in previous findings, we suggest that the relationship between entrepreneurs’ human and social capital is neither fundamentally complementary nor fundamentally compensatory; instead, the nature of this relationship is contingent on the type of support derived from the network. Our analyses, based on 474 solo nascent entrepreneurs from the PSED II, support our reasoning. While we find nascent entrepreneurs’ human capital and their financial social capital to positively interact in shaping start-up progress, we observe a negative interaction between nascent entrepreneurs’ human capital and their informational social capital. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.