How Does Team Diversity Evolve? Exploring Alternative Perspectives on Entrepreneurial Team Change

Abstract

Often organizations strive to change by attracting new members in key roles and positions. Entrepreneurial team change well exemplifies such a strategy. Young organizations in dynamic environments face multiple functional demands that rapidly change over time. Inviting other entrepreneurs to join the team is an attractive option to pool skills and cognitive resources, and, ultimately, to grow. However, sociological and psychological processes can influence the nature of team member change in opposite directions, attracting individuals on the basis of task-unrelated features, such as social categories, rather than task-related features, such as education or functional background. Drawing on three theoretical perspectives from researches on small groups—i.e., the functional, the social identity and the status perspective—we propose ant test empirically a holistic conceptual model that explains ‘how’ and to ‘what extent’ member change events influence the variety of functional backgrounds in entrepreneurial teams.