Since the majority of Mormons (58 percent) believe marriages are most satisfying when women stay home, men tend to be their family’s sole bread-winners and gravitate when possible toward well-paying, stable jobs. That often means drawing on traits honed in congregational life.

In laying groundwork for a successful business career, it helps to become a religious leader at age 12.

That’s when Mormon boys receive the first mantle of authority as deacons in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which has no professional clergy but vests ordinary people with religious duties, at young ages. Boys conduct meetings, raise money, and give talks for adult crowds while they’re still settling into middle school.

Shouldering responsibility from childhood, according to scholars and observers, helps account for extraordinary success among executives such as Mitt Romney, who built a fortune in venture capital before seeking the GOP presidential nomination.

He’s far from alone. Mormons have held top jobs at a range of brand-name organizations, from JetBlue to American Express, Marriott International to the Boston Celtics.

To be sure, the stereotype can be misleading. Plenty of America’s 6.1 million Mormons don’t climb the corporate ladder. The church does not aim to turn out C-suite executives. The connection between the religion and business leadership is more subtle than that, observers say. For a child who has talent and ambition, the cultural conditioning the church gives can translate into a leg up in corporate America.

“You do see a disproportionate percentage of Mormons who have decent organizational and managerial skills,” says Jeff Benedict, a Mormon journalist who profiles executives in his book “The Mormon Way of Doing Business: Leadership and Success Through Faith and Family.” “That’s because, at a very young age, Mormon kids are given responsibilities and taught to organize.”

Mormons need no convincing that religious experience enhances business success. The LDS Church strongly encourages men at age 19 to go on a full-time, two-year mission to help grow church ranks. (Women go on missions in their early 20s, though it’s not as strongly encouraged for them, and few move into executive positions in the business world. Eighty percent of American Mormons say their mission experiences, which often include living abroad and the toughening that comes with knocking on doors, have been very valuable in preparing them for a career, according to a fall 2011 Pew Forum survey.

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