The Role of Relational Characteristics in Information Seeking for Opportunity Recognition

Opportunity recognition (OpR) has long been accepted as a key aspect of the entrepreneurial process. Discovering entrepreneurial opportunities requires individuals to seek information from many sources. The existing research on information seeking and OpR has examined the information seekers´ personality traits and the attributes of the information source, however, we know little about the relational characteristics of social interaction that facilitate information seeking in OpR. So this paper studies how different characteristics of individuals´ relationships with others influence their perception of information about opportunities. We focus on four relational characteristics, that is, (1) knowing, (2) emotional support, (3) legitimacy, and (4) trust. We build the model and collected empirical data from loan managers of a bank in China. Then we use quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) to test the model statistically. Our analyses show that all characteristics except legitimacy influence the entrepreneurs´ acquisition of information in their opportunity recognition significantly.