Citizenship behavior and new venture survival: a cultural tightness-looseness capabilities lens

Abstract

PurposeThe authors advance a model theorizing how new ventures elicit citizenship behaviors to cultivate dynamic capabilities that help bolster survival in their nascent years of operations—a characteristically resource-scarce and turbulent context.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on and integrating research on citizenship behaviors with dynamic capabilities, the authors develop a theory that new ventures that are better able to evoke a combination of affiliative and challenging citizenship behaviors from their wider entrepreneurial team (i.e. internal, and external stakeholders) are more adept at mitigating the liabilities of smallness and newness. As these behaviors are spontaneous and not explicitly remunerated, new ventures become stronger at utilizing their limited resource base for remaining lean and agile. Further, key boundary conditions are theorized that the sociocultural norms the venture is embedded within serve to heighten/attenuate the degree to which entrepreneurs can effectively cultivate dynamic capabilities from their team's “extra mile” behaviors.FindingsThe propositions extend a rich body of research on citizenship behaviors into the new venture domain. As all new ventures face the challenge of overcoming liabilities of newness, models that help understand why some are more adept at overcoming this and why others fail, hold substantive practical utility.Originality/valueThis research is the first to unpack how citizenship behaviors manifest among an extended range of stakeholders traditionally overlooked in new venture teams research and the mechanism for how this links to venture survival.