Family Diversity and Hybrid Entrepreneurship: A Family Embeddedness Perspective

Abstract How does family diversity affect the choice of hybrid entrepreneurship? The effect of family dynamics has received little attention in research on the mode of entry into entrepreneurship. Building on the family embeddedness perspective, we hypothesize that the diversity of family households at surface (i.e., age and gender) and deep (i.e., work experience and education background) levels impacts the entrepreneur's adoption of a full-time or hybrid mode to start a new business. We further theorize that the effects of family diversity on entrepreneurial entry decisions are moderated by income stratification, which largely determines the ways entrepreneurs deal with family diversity. Using a sample of 1,320 individual-wave observations from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), our findings demonstrate that the choice of hybrid entrepreneurship is affected more by deep-level diversity than surface-level diversity among family households. Moreover, being from a high-strata family strengthens the relationship between surface-level diversity and the choice of hybrid entry, while weakening the effects of deep-level diversity. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion about family dynamics and entrepreneurship variations and provides important theoretical and practical implications.