CANCELLED: Membership change and functional variety churn in entrepreneurial teams

Venue:  Department of Economics and Management, Via Inama 5 (Trento) - seminar room
Time: 2 PM

Speaker:

• Simone Santoni - Cass Business School, City University London

Abstract:
The burgeoning literature on the impact of team change on team diversity has neglected to investigate the conditions under which the addition or replacement of a team member results in a (successful) expansion of teams’ diversity of knowledge, skills, and abilities, which ultimately influence team performance. Drawing on team diversity literature, we unveil the mechanisms that link this functional background variety to functional background variety churn (i.e., a change in functional background variety following a team member addition or replacement event). We explore the factors that moderate this relationship and address the role of two emergent team states: namely, diversity in beliefs and status, as well as their joint influence. Finally, we link functional background variety and variety churn to firm performance. We test our conceptual model on a novel sample of 473 newly established, technology-based firms and the 2,376 members of their entrepreneurial teams. Results indicate that entrepreneurial teams’ ability to reconfigure themselves (via variety churn) is boosted by high diversity in beliefs and low diversity in status. These two emergent team states also enable the indirect effect of functional background variety on firm performance via variety churn. We offer implications for management theory and entrepreneurial practice.