The Performance of Pre‐Founding Entrepreneurial Teams: The Importance of Learning and Leadership

Abstract

Entrepreneurial teams often struggle with simultaneous task and team challenges at an early stage of new venture creation. The way in which teams shape their teamwork is key in leveraging performance in the pre-founding phase. Learning should help the team in establishing good teamwork and in expanding its members entrepreneurial capabilities. Leadership is needed to facilitate and guide this learning. Accordingly, we investigated learning and leadership as facilitators of performance in the pre-founding phase. Specifically, we examined team reflexivity as a collective internal learning process and boundary spanning behaviour as an externally directed individual activity, operating at different levels in fostering team and individual performance. Charismatic team leadership was examined as a catalyst of learning, shaping team and individual performance ultimately. The multilevel mediation model was tested based on data from 196 members of 58 teams of a venture creation programme. Team reflexivity predicted team and individual performance. Boundary spanning behaviour was not related to performance. As hypothesised, charismatic team leadership predicted team and individual performance, both mediated by team reflexivity. This research highlights the relevance of team learning in pre-founding teams and emphasises leadership in shaping learning and moving new ventures forward.

How Shared Leadership in Entrepreneurial Teams Influences New Venture Performance: A Moderated Mediation Model

“…Team reflexivity reflects team members’ collective efforts on reflecting and raising new consciousness about task-related issues (Knipfer et al, 2018; Schippers et al, 2015). It involves the twofold actions of reflective discussions about previous actions such as the alignment of shared goals, and adaptive preparation for future activities such as renewed strategy implementation (De Jong & Elfring, 2010; Lyubovnikova et al, 2017).…”

“…Following the focus of entrepreneurship literature on leadership as a vital aspect of team function, previous empirical studies have shown that the leadership behaviors of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial teams are likely to have deep impacts on the growth of their new ventures (Knipfer et al, 2018; Miao et al, 2019). Most of these scholarly efforts shed light on how the lead entrepreneur’s overarching style and behavior drives the entrepreneurial team dynamics (Knight et al, 2020; Knipfer et al, 2018). However, recent studies have pinpointed that entrepreneurship depends more on a socially distributed process than the hierarchical influence of a formal leader (Cardon et al, 2017).…”

“…Entrepreneurial teams serving as the information processing brain of new ventures particularly need to acquire and interpret environmental information to survive in a changing environment (Li, 2018; Parida et al, 2018). Given the relevance of information processing, entrepreneurial teams must execute specific leadership behaviors in initiating, facilitating, and guiding information processing associated with the entrepreneurial challenges and uncertainties (Knipfer et al, 2018). We thus appreciate shared leadership as a facilitator of information processing in entrepreneurial teams, shaping new venture performance.…”

“…Team reflexivity is the process of reflecting on and regulating collective goals or strategies with responding to current or anticipated conditions (De Jong & Elfring, 2010; Li et al, 2018). It is suggested that team reflexivity is particularly prominent for entrepreneurial teams because constant contemplations and evaluations manifested in team reflexivity can help identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities (Knipfer et al, 2018). Therefore, we theorize that shared leadership in entrepreneurial teams can foster team reflexivity, which in turn, heighten new venture performance.…”

“…Previous studies have indicated that team boundary spanning is an efficient way for entrepreneurial teams to conquer resource shortage by attaining external resources (Joshi et al, 2009). Thus, team boundary spanning is immensely valuable for entrepreneurial teams, because of its high requirements of collecting and processing extensive amounts of environmental information for effective opportunity identification (Knipfer et al, 2018). Although the direct performance effects of team boundary spanning have been empirically examined (Ferguson et al, 2019; Marrone, 2010), how team boundary spanning acts as a boundary condition on the intrateam information processes, particularly in the entrepreneurial context, has so far been much less explored.…”