Entrepreneurial Orientation and Motivation: Evidence of Religious Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The prevailing notion that its fundamental attributes - capacity for innovation, proactivity, competitive aggressiveness, risk assumption and autonomy - are essentially employed in the search for opportunities is inserted in the literature on Entrepreneurial Guidance (EO). However, this may not explain everything. Evidence sustains on the argument that other motifs, still unexplored by the literature of the area, could be inserted there. The present article, of theoretical and empirical nature, is part of this context. The objective is to investigate the inductive factors of EO, that is, motivations that impact its manifestation. It does this in two main ways. In the theoretical scope, when associating to the EO the literature on entrepreneurial motivations; in the empirical context, when investigating, under a qualitative approach and multiple holistic case study strategy, a particular type of entrepreneurship, of a religious nature, highly emergent and still little investigated in Brazil. In all, 19 Neo-Pentecostal pastors responsible for the creation and conduction of their churches were investigated. Evidence from the field allows us to verify that OE behaviors are hatched in response to the combined influence of opportunity factors, as already pointed out in the literature, and also by the necessity for survival, as here identified in an innovative way. At the same time, they allow other contributions to the OE literature, providing them with unprecedented interpretations.