Inspirational Norm: How Successful Entrepreneurs in the Media Serve as Entrepreneurial Role Models Across Cultural Tightness-Looseness

Abstract: Although media exposure to successful entrepreneurs is believed to inspire entrepreneurship through role modeling, existing empirical evidence presents a mixed puzzle. Our research set out to resolve this puzzle by examining how cultural contexts differently shape the inspirational effect of successful entrepreneurs in the media. We investigated whether cultural tightness-looseness, the cultural variance in the emphasis on social norms, can explain the puzzling effect of entrepreneurial role modeling. While cultural tightness is often considered to restrict entrepreneurship due to strict social norms, we proposed a counterintuitive dynamic that the salience of social norms in tight cultures can amplify the role modeling effectiveness of media-featured entrepreneurs. We tested our argument across three multimethod studies, including a large-scale international archival study, a preregistered randomized experiment, and a quasi-experiment using population-level dataset. Our research suggests how role modeling interacts with cultural contexts that shape the salience of social comparison with successful examples.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, cultural tightness-looseness, role model, social comparison, social norm