Can You Lend Me a Hand? Task-Role Alignment of Social Support and Entrepreneurial Persistence*

Informal social relations play a significant role in people's lives. Despite considerable research on social networks and social capital, sociologists still do not clearly understood why some relationships lead to better outcomes than others. This article examines how individuals mobilize social support, defined as resources that flow through social relations, to achieve their objectives. We propose that the effectiveness of social support depends on aligned role expectations between individuals and their support networks. We revisit the assumption that simply " more support is better " when pursuing specific goals. Using a nationally-representative sample of individuals starting new businesses, we test the hypothesis that social support is most effective when requested assistance matches with role expectations. We find strong support for our expectations, as founders whose support is aligned with role expectations are more likely to overcome resource constraints and persist in the founding process. As social structures evolve towards greater fragmentation and isolation, our findings suggest that task-role aligned relations promote more effective social support. More broadly, we link two research streams—theories of organizational emergence and social support—to explain how task-role alignment improves our understanding of how informal social relations affect individual actions.