Founding Teams

Abstract

In the field of entrepreneurship, founding teams have received attention because such individuals comprise the early (intangible) assets of the enterprise. Not only do such teams shape the trajectory of the venture, their choices, skills, and experience likely impact intermediate and long-term outcomes of the enterprise. The founding team is distinguished from production teams in that the former is responsible for setting higher-order formal and informal policies that likely have organization-wide implications. While the management and organizations literatures have a longer tradition of examining top management teams (TMTs), founding teams are distinguished in that they are often the first TMT of the organization. Often, founding teams are responsible for a general set of responsibilities, which are only narrowed once specialist job roles are created (often at the executive officer level) and filled. This transition process of the initial founder or founding team has also been an object of study in the literature. Another distinguishing feature of founding teams from the general TMT literature is that the imprint of the founding has been theorized and found to have long-lived effects on a variety of organizational trajectories. As a consequence, founding teams and the informal and formal policies they enact can have very long-lived consequences for the trajectory of organizational development. Founding team composition reflects individuals’ human and social capital. As a result, it is important to consider the literature relating to such capital and organizational outcomes. In general, the literature on individual training, education, and experience and new venture outcomes is much older and long-standing as compared to that of founding teams. The current state of the literature is moving beyond the individual level of human and social capital development to extend into the realm of founding team assets.