Altruistic entrepreneurs: How does religious belief affect entrepreneurial career persistence?

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the influence of entrepreneurs’ religious beliefs on entrepreneurial career persistence, with altruism as a mediating mechanism at the psychological level. Based on the theory of role boundary permeability, we propose that the moral values contained in entrepreneurs’ religious beliefs permeate into their entrepreneurial domain, making them more altruistic. Using a unique longitudinal, multilevel dataset derived from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we tested our hypotheses on 4,848 observations of entrepreneurs’ career persistence spanning three consecutive two-year periods (2012−2014, 2014−2016, and 2016−2018) using multilevel logistic regression. Our findings show that religious beliefs enhance entrepreneurial altruism and subsequently increase the probability of entrepreneurial career persistence. More broadly, our study provides new insights into the psychological-level mechanisms at work in the entrepreneurial practice of religious entrepreneurs, adding an important new explanation to the limited research on how religion matters for entrepreneurship.KEYWORDS: Religious beliefaltruismentrepreneurial career persistencerole boundary permeabilityChina family panel studies (CFPS) Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 The results are available upon request.2 The results are available upon request.Additional informationFundingThe Innovation Strategy Research Project of Fujian Provincial Department of Science and Technology [2022R0024].