Emotional support and new venture performance: The role of founders’ family, friends and cultural context in East Asia

While the value of a founder’s emotional support is widely acknowledged, its impact on new venture performance remains underexplored. Advancing a culturally embedded view, we draw on East Asian contexts where emotional support from family and friends is culturally salient to propose that such support drives firm performance through the mechanism of relational indebtedness. Building on the optimal matching model, we construct a context-sensitive need-support-fit framework, examining how this relationship is moderated by support demand intensity and substitution availability, shaped by face logic. Using survey data from 2747 new ventures in China, Japan and South Korea, we find that emotional support is positively associated with new venture performance. This association is stronger for female and older founders, but weaker for founders with more leadership experience or incubator affiliation. This study advances entrepreneurship literature by revealing the firm-level impact of emotional support and the key contextual boundary conditions that shape its role.