The Perception of a Founder’s Obsessive Passion and Co-founders’ Decision to Join the Venture Team

Abstract

We investigate how perceived obsessive passions (OPs) influence potential co-founders’ decision to join a venture team. Using a conjoint experiment with two samples: 116 founder entrepreneurs and 177 master business school students (supplementary sample), we find that potential co-founders are more likely to join when they perceive that the founder has OP for inventing and developing. Potential co-founders are less likely to join when they perceived OP for founding. Further, we also find significant interactions between perceived OPs, and interactions between perceived OP and potential co-founders’ own OP. These findings provide important theoretical implications.