Leader Emergence in Nascent Venture Teams: The Critical Roles of Individual Emotion Regulation and Team Emotions

Charlotta Sirén,Zoe Jonassen,Georg Von Krogh,Henrik Wesemann,Vivianna Fang He,Dietmar Grichnik

doi:10.1111/joms.12563

Charlotta Sirén, Zoe Jonassen + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12563

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Abstract

AbstractThis study advances a theory of how different aspects of emotion regulation influence individual leader emergence in the intensely emotional context of nascent venture teams. Despite the growing amount of research on the role of leadership in the entrepreneurial process, the emergence of leaders in nascent venture teams has rarely been explored. Drawing on theories and research on leadership emergence and emotion regulation, we argue that the two aspects of emotion regulation (i.e., reappraisal and suppression) exert opposite effects on the degree to which nascent venture team members come to perceive an individual as a leader. We also theorize that team emotions arising from affective events moderate the relationship between reappraisal and leader emergence in such teams. Data from 103 nascent venture teams without prior leaders show a negative relationship between individuals’ trait disposition to suppress emotions and their emergence as leaders, and a positive relationship between their trait disposition to reappraise emotions and their emergence as leaders. Moreover, we find that negative team emotions magnify the positive association between reappraisal and leader emergence, while positive team emotions mitigate it. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on entrepreneurial leadership, entrepreneurial emotions, and leadership in general.

Highlights

Leadership plays a pivotal role in the formation and growth of nascent ventures (Chen, 2007; Eesley et al, 2014; Kang et al, 2015)
Our analyses showed that reappraisal helped individual team members establish themselves as leaders, while suppression hindered leader emergence
We demonstrate that an individual’s tendency to engage in reappraisal is a powerful predictor of his or her leader emergence when the nascent venture team experiences affective events, such as crises, drawbacks, and failures, or when the team loses its enthusiasm in the course of daily, mundane tasks – situations that primarily call for reappraisals of negative emotions

Summary

Introduction

Leadership plays a pivotal role in the formation and growth of nascent ventures (Chen, 2007; Eesley et al, 2014; Kang et al, 2015). The extant research on leadership in the entrepreneurial setting mostly focuses on the leadership style or behavior of the founder (Kang et al, 2015), while few studies simultaneously explore the individual- and team-level dynamics that underpin the process of leader emergence in teams (Dinh et al, 2014; Paunova, 2015). This oversight is problematic for contemporary entrepreneurship literature because prior research has demonstrated that teams found and lead the majority of ventures (Klotz et al, 2014), and that entrepreneurship is rarely constrained to a solo, heroic leader (Harper, 2008). Consistent with previous research (Foo et al, 2006), we define nascent venture teams as teams consisting of individuals who are taking tentative steps towards firm formation

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