On the Organizational Design of Entrepreneurial Ventures: A First Empirical Look!

Abstract

Several studies claim that entrepreneurial venture should pay attention to their organizational design in order to improve performance. However, a clear understanding on how these ventures organize is still missing. Entrepreneurial ventures’ organizational design still remains an ambiguous concept, which has been rarely analyzed empirically. In this paper, we borrow organizational design elements from the literature on established firms and we use them as a lens to provide a fist empirical overview on the entrepreneurial ventures’ organization. We analyze a sample of 255 Italian entrepreneurial venture, focusing on their top management teams and on the most important organizational design elements: hierarchical structure, size, functional specialization, and delegation. In so doing, we first relate these elements to four contingency factors (i.e., EV’s size, age, industry, and geographical location) and then we adopt a two-step cluster analysis to understand whether the complementarities and interdependencies among organizational design elements give rise to organizational configurations. Results reveal the presence of three distinct configurations, which we named collaborative TMT, centric TMT, and professional TMT.