1798: The Ask: How Entrepreneurs Enroll Stakeholders Through Relational Capital (13641)

Despite the centrality of stakeholder enrollment to the entrepreneurial process, surprisingly little is known about the corresponding micro-level mechanisms that drive it, its range of potential outcomes, and the way it influences the trajectories of both ventures and individual entrepreneurs. We build on insights from social psychology as well as recent entrepreneurship research to generate framing questions around “the ask” as the micro-foundational mechanism of stakeholder enrollment. We investigate these questions that link asking to the daily actions of entrepreneurs and how those lead to enrolling stakeholder as they build their venture. Through two studies that include quantitative and qualitative data from two different populations of entrepreneurs, we find that: 1) general entrepreneurs focus mainly on short term transactional needs seldom engaging in efforts to build relational capital; 2) high performance entrepreneurs practice relational asks to enroll stakeholders that may ultimately become customers, suppliers, investors, and partners. We use these findings to sketch several avenues for research.

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