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“Confucian” traits, entrepreneurial personality, and entrepreneurship in China: a regional analysis

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Abstract

Regional personality differences have been linked to regional entrepreneurship in Western countries. Here, we offer a first analysis of the relationship between regional personality and manifest and latent entrepreneurship in China. Because Western research has highlighted the role of an entrepreneurial constellation of the Big Five traits, we compare region-level correlates of Big Five scores with corresponding correlates of indigenous “Confucian” traits, interpersonal relatedness, and its sub-facets traditionalism, Renqing, face, discipline, and harmony. We utilize personality data collected from a representative sample (N = 26,405) of 44 major Chinese cities. We find substantial, meaningful, and robust negative correlations of interpersonal relatedness and its sub-facet traditionalism, face, and discipline with indicators of both manifest entrepreneurship (e.g., rate of newly registered individually owned businesses) and latent entrepreneurship (e.g., number of entrepreneurship-related search queries in the leading Chinese internet search engine: Baidu.com). Robustness checks using the geographical distance to the Forbidden City in Beijing as an exogenous instrument for regional “Confucian” traits supported our findings. In contrast, regional levels in the Big Five traits and in an entrepreneurial Big Five profile were rather irrelevant (e.g., openness was negatively associated with indicators of manifest entrepreneurship). Our study indicates the usefulness of an indigenous personality approach in the study of entrepreneurship in China. The present results give rise to the idea that in populations in China with less emphasis on traditional Confucian values and norms, the development of an active entrepreneurial culture is more accelerated.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Thomas Talhelm for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and to Hannah Honecker and Forough Zarea Fazlelahi for research assistance.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71774156).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

    Martin Obschonka

  2. Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Mingjie Zhou & Jianxin Zhang

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Mingjie Zhou & Jianxin Zhang

  4. Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Yixin Zhou

  5. University of Jena, Jena, Germany

    Rainer K. Silbereisen

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  1. Martin Obschonka
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Correspondence to Mingjie Zhou.

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Table 5 Items measuring the interpersonal relatedness sub-facets
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Obschonka, M., Zhou, M., Zhou, Y. et al. “Confucian” traits, entrepreneurial personality, and entrepreneurship in China: a regional analysis. Small Bus Econ 53, 961–979 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-018-0103-8

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