Cultural values, entrepreneurial team structure and performance of SMEs

PurposeThe main objective of this study is to explain the relationship between members' cultural values on structure and performance of the entrepreneurial teams that located in Tehran.Design/methodology/approachData used in this study are collected by a questionnaire distributed among managers and other executive members of SMEs located in Tehran. One hundred and thirty-nine participants completed the questionnaires, and their responses were analyzed using partial least squares technique. Measures showed good convergent and discriminant validity. Furthermore, Cronbach's alpha, as reliability indicator for all measures, is at the acceptable level.FindingsResearch finding shows that all hypothesis supported in Iran contex. Entrepreneurial team members' cultural values have positive and significant effect on the entrepreneurial team structure. Entrepreneurial team members' cultural values have significant effect on the entrepreneurial team performance and also, the structure of the entrepreneurial team has a positive and significant effect on the entrepreneurial team performance.Originality/valueThese studies mostly focused on technical dimensions of entrepreneurial teams and overlooked the cultural values of their members.

Digital Entrepreneurship and Innovation

This chapter is based on a case study that highlights the digital entrepreneurship and innovation of an entrepreneurial venture and team aspiring to address cash flow management issues and pains faced by the micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Malaysia. The entrepreneurial team pioneered the revolutionization of the barter trade concept by developing a digital solution and platform branded as Kongsi (initially named Qu Exchange). Kongsi is a solution using digital trade points which act as a medium of exchange in replace of cash. This solution can solve cash flow problems faced by MSMEs with the creation of a non-cash alternative financing platform, combining and integrating the concept of barter trade and a point-based system. In this case study, the authors examined two critical success factors for digital entrepreneurship and innovation. This case study exemplifies a venture and entrepreneurial team capable of assembling strategic resources to create and sustain competitive advantages to survive and grow in a highly competitive FinTech environment.

Factors influencing entrepreneurial team (ET) performance in education and childcare franchise: case of Malaysia

Purpose Over these recent years, increasing studies have found a higher propensity of firms founded by entrepreneurial teams (ETs) for continuous operation and high performance, compared to firms single-handedly created by an entrepreneur. In spite of the emerging significance of ETs, the number of related studies remains inadequately low, particularly within the context of franchise firms. Therefore, this study aims to explore the factors that influence the ETs’ performance in the Malaysian education and childcare franchise system using a qualitative approach. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative Research Strategy has been adopted and 27 ET leaders participated in this study to get the holistic view of factors influencing the entrepreneurial team (ET) performance in education and childcare franchise in Malaysia. Findings The results highlight the factors (team leadership, team training, team diversity, team processes, team confidence and team mental models) influencing the entrepreneurial team (ET) performance in education and childcare franchise in Malaysia. Originality/value The present study may help to provide useful information to policy makers, which enable them to formulate the strategies franchise ETs performance in Malaysia. As this study provides insight of factors that have an impact on ET performance. A best practice model for education and childcare franchise ETs’ performance is designed.

Organizing Entrepreneurial Teams: A Field Experiment on Autonomy over Choosing Teams and Ideas

Scholars have suggested that autonomy can lead to better entrepreneurial team performance. Yet, there are different types of autonomy, and they come at a cost. We shed light on whether two fundamental organizational design choices—granting teams autonomy to (1) choose project ideas to work on and (2) choose team members to work with—affect performance. We run a field experiment involving 939 students in a lean startup entrepreneurship course over 11 weeks. The aim is to disentangle the separate and joint effects of granting autonomy over choosing teams and choosing ideas compared with a baseline treatment with preassigned ideas and team members. We find that teams with autonomy over choosing either ideas or team members outperform teams in the baseline treatment as measured by pitch deck performance. The effect of choosing ideas is significantly stronger than the effect of choosing teams. However, the performance gains vanish for teams that are granted full autonomy over choosing both ideas and teams. This suggests the two forms of autonomy are substitutes. Causal mediation analysis reveals that the main effects of choosing ideas or teams can be partly explained by a better match of ideas with team members’ interests and prior network contacts among team members, respectively. Although homophily and lack of team diversity cannot explain the performance drop among teams with full autonomy, our results suggest that self-selected teams fall prey to overconfidence and complacency too early to fully exploit the potential of their chosen idea. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on organizational design, autonomy, and innovation.

The Impact Mechanism of Entrepreneurial Team Expertise Heterogeneity on Entrepreneurial Decision

Under the background of economic globalization and industrial revolution, team entrepreneurship has drawn increased attention. Team entrepreneurship is considered to be advantageous in its capability of integrating more abundant resources and of sharing knowledge, information, and complementary skills among members of the entrepreneurial team, enabling entrepreneurial enterprises to successfully adapt to the highly uncertain entrepreneurial environment. In recent years, the relationship between the heterogeneity of the entrepreneurial team and its decision-making quality has attracted much attention in the management research field. However, the research results on such topic are quite inconsistent. Based on the information processing theory, the greater the market uncertainty the entrepreneurial team faces, the stronger information integration ability a team will be required to possess. This study investigates the mechanism and boundary conditions of the impact of expertise heterogeneity of the entrepreneurial team on entrepreneurial decision-making. It points out that team knowledge integration and team reflexivity have significant impacts on the relationship between entrepreneurial team expertise heterogeneity and entrepreneurial decision-making. This study adopts the multi-source design approach and collects data from 419 academic entrepreneurial teams in the University Science and Technology Park in Zhejiang Province. Hierarchical regression and bootstrapping methods are also employed for data analysis. The results show that team knowledge integration mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial team expertise heterogeneity and entrepreneurial decision-making, whereas team reflexivity moderates the relationship between entrepreneurial team expertise heterogeneity and team knowledge integration. In the final part, the practical implications for entrepreneurial team are discussed.

An Empirical Study on the Impact of Team Entrepreneurship Passion on the Tobacco Products Entrepreneurial Performance of New Ventures: Mediating Effect Test Based on Bootstrap Model

In this paper, following the research logic of Emotion/Feature-Behavior-Result, the focus is put on how the entrepreneurial passion of interactive-oriented teams in the tobacco products entrepreneurial can improve corporate performance by affecting entrepreneurial learning. The multiple regression method is used to test 238 valid questionnaires of new ventures, and the Bootstrap model is used to verify the mediating effect of entrepreneurial learning according to the multiple mediating effect analysis method proposed by scholars. The results show that: (1) The entrepreneurial passion of the team will affect the tobacco products entrepreneurial process of the new venture team, and the team with high passion atmosphere is more likely to improve the performance of the new enterprise. As a strong positive emotion experienced by the entrepreneurial team in their entrepreneurial activities, can not only influence the entrepreneurial team to identify with their entrepreneurial identity sharing, but also promote the growth of enterprises. (2) There is a significant mediating effect of exploratory learning and exploitative learning in the process of the impact of team entrepreneurial passion on the performance of the innovator but no significant difference in the mediating effects of the two. Entrepreneurial passion drives the tobacco products entrepreneurs to make a strong emotional commitment to the new innovator and invest much effort, and entrepreneurial learning is an effective way to help solve the problem of the new innovator. The research results can help to further interpret the mechanism of the role of the tobacco products entrepreneurial enthusiasm on the performance of innovators, expand the mediating factors between the two from psychological to behavioral factors, enrich the research on the performance promotion mechanism of new innovators, promote the organization learning behavior combined with entrepreneurship research, and also provide references and suggestions for the tobacco products entrepreneurs to improve their entrepreneurial performance through learning behaviors.

The influence of individual characteristics on getting involved in an entrepreneurial team: The contingent role of individualism

A traditional stereotype of the entrepreneur is that of a lone hero. However, many entrepreneurs engage in new businesses as members of entrepreneurial teams. These teams usually perform better in terms of employment generation, innovation, and profits. Thus, a relevant question is why some individuals get involved in entrepreneurship through a team rather than alone. Our explanation is focused on two variables related to the entrepreneur’s human capital: their educational level and their intrapreneurial experience. There are conflicting arguments on how these variables lead an entrepreneur to join a team, and we argue that the degree of individualism of the society helps us understand the discrepancies. We use a sample of 66,716 early-stage entrepreneurs from 66 countries surveyed by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor between 2014 and 2017. Our results show that entrepreneurs with higher levels of education and intrapreneurial experience are more likely to be involved in the entrepreneurship process as members of teams. However, the effect of educational level is less pronounced in individualist contexts. In addition, we find that the motivation to enter entrepreneurship partially mediates these relationships, as individuals endowed with higher human capital are likely to enter entrepreneurship driven by an opportunistic motivation, which in turns makes them likely to need or join teams to reach their goals.

Academic Teams and Commercialization in the Life Sciences

We review the literature on entrepreneurial team formation with a focus on data to study academic teams and summarize our empirical work on the life sciences industry. We consider how academics form teams to start new companies and the implications of various configurations on firm behavior with regards to patenting, survival and firm growth. We present several empirical challenges facing research on academic teams and conclude with suggestions for future research.

Entrepreneurial Team Knowledge Diversity and Creativity: A Multilevel Analysis of Knowledge Sharing, Individual Creativity, and Team Creativity

Although the academic community has consistent with the key role of entrepreneurial team knowledge diversity (ETKD), which serves as a critical catalyst of creativity in organizations, the extant research on the link between knowledge diversity and creativity is mainly concerned with individual creativity in single-level analyses. With emerging entrepreneurial ventures increasingly relying on innovation enhancement in the form of teams, there is research motivation to explore how team-level creativity develops. In this sense, this study attempts to investigate the underlying mechanism through which ETKD is associated with team-level creativity. Through a multilevel mediation model, this study proposes that ETKD can facilitate team creativity (TC) sequentially transmitted through individual-level team members' knowledge sharing (KS) and creativity. Based on a survey of 252 team members from 42 entrepreneurial teams in China, multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) is applied to test the top–down relationship between ETKD and KS, as well as the bottom-up link between individual creativity and TC. The findings show that our hypotheses are supported. Our findings provide some of the first empirical evidence to examine how knowledge-based diversity of entrepreneurial teams facilitates TC potential by multilevel approach. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are also offered.