Human capital and career success of creative entrepreneurs: is guanxi network a missing link?

Abstract

Entrepreneurial human capital has long been regarded as the determinant of entrepreneurial career success. Guanxi, which embodies Chinese entrepreneurs’ informal networks, is an advantage-seeking behavior prevalent in the emerging industry sectors, such as creative industries. As a rising industry sector which consists of mostly small businesses and start-ups, creative industries are increasingly a theoretical focus in the recent entrepreneurship research. Therefore, we draw upon the guanxi perspective to investigate the relationship between human capital, social capital, and entrepreneurial career success in creative industries. This paper examines a sample of 133 creative entrepreneurs in Taiwan. Results reveal that entrepreneurs’ human capital is related to their guanxi networks, which in turn are associated with new venture performance and entrepreneurial career success. Specifically, both business ties and government ties are found to benefit from the entrepreneurial experience and educational level, whereas prior work experience of entrepreneurs shows no significant effect on improving guanxi networks. Our findings furthermore suggest that entrepreneurs’ family ties, business ties, and government ties are conducive to their social reputation, career achievement, entrepreneurial satisfaction, and firm profitability. Interestingly, our results indicate that community ties may weaken entrepreneurs’ career achievement. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.