Two's Company: Composition, Structure and Performance of Entrepreneurial Pairs

Abstract

We explore the effects of diverse team composition on the survival and growth of new ventures using the Danish Linked Employer‐Employee database. To get cleaner measures of diverse team composition, we focus on entrepreneurial dyads, and also investigate the asymmetric hierarchical effects of team composition by distinguishing between the ‘primary’ and the ‘secondary’ member. We complement existing work by showing that heterogeneity in team composition is moderated by the asymmetric hierarchical structure within the team, and that a unidimensional diversity indicator (which is usually applied) fails to capture a number of performance effects of heterogeneous team composition. Pairs of younger individuals have lower survival chances but higher employment growth. Pairs led by a male tend toward ‘jobless growth’ in the sense that they have higher growth of profits and sales but not employment. Family firms have lower employment growth, especially when formed with one's mother.

My first employee: an empirical investigation

“…used in Nanda and Sørensen (2010), Dahl and Sorenson (2012), Coad and Timmermans (2014) and Nielsen (2015); see also Timmermans (2010)]. How this register database differs from other registers is that it is created in close collaboration with academic researchers for the purpose of conducting labour market research.…”

Task Conflict, Narcissism and Entrepreneurial Capability in Teams Planning a Business: A Moderated Moderation Approach to Explaining Business Planning Performance

“…These issues would make it difficult to trace and attribute causal relationships and could also contaminate the effects investigated. Consequently, this study examined two‐person teams in line with other studies in entrepreneurship such as Harper () or Coad and Timmermans (). The random assignment of students into the teams is again meaningful when targeting high internal validity as it helps reduce confounding effects (see Klein et al for a comparable procedure) due to occurrences such as acquaintance (e.g., Jehn and Shah ).…”

Diversity in One Dimension Alongside Greater Similarity in Others: Evidence from FP7 Cooperative Research Teams

“…Third, restricting all of our observations to teams with a similar number of participants (between 7 and 9 members) will mean that our observations are closely comparable. Indeed, diversity indicators are not invariant to the number of team members (Coad and Timmermans 2014), and we wish to avoid any spurious results that might emerge from comparing diversity indicators from teams of very different sizes.…”