Purpose Recent research acknowledges entrepreneurial passion’s outcomes, but far less is known about how entrepreneurial passion comes about. In this study, the authors are interested in the emergence of entrepreneurial passion, and how competences and social network are associated with entrepreneurial passion. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The authors investigate whether entrepreneurial passion emerges out of socialisation, entrepreneurial experience or various combinations thereof. The authors tested the hypotheses on a data set of entrepreneurs who started their businesses with government financial support (n=1150). Findings The findings show that within a social environment, perceived emotional support is positively associated with entrepreneurial passion. Moreover, entrepreneurs’ task-related competence moderates this relationship positively. By investigating the emergence of entrepreneurial passion, the authors contribute to prior passion literature, which has mainly focused on its consequences. Originality/value The findings demonstrate both how entrepreneurial passion is associated with and how perceived emotional support can stem from unexpected sources, such as from a government-based start-up grant. For entrepreneurs, an increased awareness of passion’s emergence could better encourage them in their entrepreneurial endeavours. To people who are engaged in promoting entrepreneurship, our findings emphasise the symbolic and emotional aspects of instruments intended to support entrepreneurship.

An individual's commitment stimulates action, but we know little about how entrepreneurial commitment initially emerges. Utilizing affect-as-information and the appraisal theory, our objective is to investigate the influence of situational emotional information on individuals' venture goal commitment, defined as commitment to the goal of starting a new venture. Based on a correlational pilot study and an experimental scenario approach, we first link encouragement and discouragement provided by the individual's parents and friends to venture goal commitment and test the mediating role of opportunity evaluation. Second, we find that emotional intelligence plays a moderating role in the relationship between situational emotional information and venture goal commitment as mediated through opportunity evaluation. Overall, our research underscores the emotional and cognitive mechanisms that shape venture goal commitment by explaining how and under which conditions situational emotional information is internalized and venture goal commitment emerges.

In this article, we develop three ideal types of cultural expectations informed by a qualitative critical event analysis of Danish entrepreneurs’ expectations of emotional support, informing a broader conceptual framework and future research agenda of cultural expectation alignment of support behaviour. We suggest that family relations associate with altruism and a family logic, friends with mutualism and a community logic and businesspersons with egoism and a market logic. These cultural expectations shape how entrepreneurs emotionally react to received support, or lack thereof, from these role-relations, and consequently outcomes of the support. Thus, effects of social support are about ‘what you get’ relative to ‘what you expect’.

This study investigates whether the emotional support individuals have available from their social network influences the likelihood that they in turn provide instrumental support to entrepreneurs they know: if they pass on the good vibes. Hypotheses are tested on a Danish data set consisting of individuals who know a nascent entrepreneur ( N = 392). The article demonstrates how emotional support made available to individuals from their social network impacts the likelihood of them providing entrepreneurs with instrumental support. Furthermore, findings show how the relation between available emotional support and the provision of instrumental support depends on culturally defined norms associated with various role-relationships and gender. The study contributes to existing theory by changing the perspective from focusing only on differences in characteristics between entrepreneurs to how the individuals in entrepreneurs’ social networks differ in characteristics and how this affects their social support to entrepreneurs. Furthermore, a significant contribution is the demonstration of how the provision of social support to entrepreneurs is contingent on different role-relationships.

In this study, we are interested in whether and when individuals' ability to interact with others influences their tendency to provide social support to nascent entrepreneurs. We argue that social skills are not only necessary for entrepreneurs to obtain resources, but also important for those people (alters) providing entrepreneurs with support, and especially so in strong relationships.We argue that in strong relationships, expectations of social support exchange pressure potential support providers to provide support in order to meet those expectations. Empirically, we found an association between social skills and exchange of social support, dependent on the strength of the relationship between the resource provider and the nascent entrepreneur. The hypotheses were tested on a dataset containing 458 individuals who know a nascent entrepreneur in Denmark.