On the organizational design of entrepreneurial ventures: the configurations of the entrepreneurial team

Abstract

Several studies claim that entrepreneurial ventures should pay attention to their organizational design in order to improve performance. However, a clear understanding of these ventures' organizational design is still missing. In this paper, we borrow the key organizational design elements from the literature on established firms and we study them simultaneously to provide a first empirical overview on the organization of the entrepreneurial ventures. Specifically, we investigate whether and how organizational design elements cluster together in different organizational configurations. To do so, we analyze a sample of 255 Italian entrepreneurial ventures, focusing on their entrepreneurial team and on the most important organizational design elements: hierarchical structure, size, functional specialization, and allocation of decision authority. To this end, we first use t tests, ANOVA tests, and Scheffe post hoc tests to explore the associations between the organizational design elements and four contingency factors (i.e., entrepreneurial venture's size, age, industry, and geographical location). Then, we adopt a two-step cluster analysis to understand whether and how the complementarities and interdependencies among organizational design elements give rise to organizational configurations. Results reveal the presence of three distinct configurations, which we named collaborative ET, centric ET, and professional ET.

TMT organizational configurations and opportunity realization in established firms: An exploratory analysis

“…As stated in the introduction, inspired by Miles and Snow (1978) we argue that TMT organization results from the (emergent) combination of several organizational elements, which cluster into configurations (e.g., Rovelli & Butticè, 2020). Consistently with the scope of this paper, we consider six elements of the TMT organizational design, which we deem relevant for the realization of entrepreneurial opportunities.…”

“…Consistently with prior contributions (e.g., De Massis et al, 2020;Fiss, 2007;Gruber et al, 2010;Rovelli & Butticè, 2020), we identified TMT organizational configurations by running a two-step cluster analysis (e.g., Gibson & Birkinshaw, 2004;Gruber et al, 2010) on the variables described in the above session. Specifically, after standardizing all the variables 8 , we used the hierarchical cluster procedure developed by Ward (1963) to determine the number of clusters; then, we assigned the 237 sample firms to clusters through the k-means clustering method.…”

“…It also suggests that these elements mutually interact, generating a joint effect. This implies that in order to realize opportunities, firms should design these organizational elements simultaneously and coherently (Ennen & Richter, 2010;Rovelli & Butticè, 2020). Indeed, each of these elements has pros and cons that can be compensated for by other elements.…”

“…To investigate the TMT organizational configurations and their relations with opportunity realization, we rely on data collected through a large-scale survey (Rovelli & Rossi-Lamastra, 2018). The use of survey data is common both in research on TMTs -which extensively resorts to surveys of CEOs (e.g., Alexiev, Jansen, Van den Bosch, & Volberda, 2010;Carpenter et al, 2004;Ling & Kellermanns, 2010;Ling, Simsek, Lubatkin, & Veiga, 2008) -and in studies on organizational configurations -which use surveys to collect variables for the configuration analysis (Doty & Glick, 1994;Ganter & Hecker, 2014;Rovelli & Butticè, 2020). To collect useful data for our study, we administered a survey to the CEOs of a sample of Italian firms.…”

“…The explanatory variables of this study correspond to TMT organizational configurations. Consistent with previous works (De Massis, Eddleston, & Rovelli, 2020;Gruber, Heinemann, Brettel, & Hungeling, 2010;Rovelli & Butticè, 2020), we first ran a cluster analysis on variables measuring six key TMT organizational elements: TMT delegation, TMT incentives, TMT coordination, TMT communication, TMT size, and TMT formalization. Then, we created a series of dummies representing each of the organizational configurations emerging from the analysis of the variables measuring these elements.…”