Top management teams and the performance of entrepreneurial firms

By Kathleen M. Eisenhardt. 2013

125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article examines why some entrepreneurial firms succeed while others do not. The focal explanation is top management teams, including several studies that address when and how top management teams are likely to influence entrepreneurial firm performance. There are several insights. First, large and diverse teams with a history of working together are more likely to succeed. This effect is particularly large when they launch in growth markets. Second, teams are effective in making strategic decisions when they are fast, highly conflictual, and still get along. Third, they are also effective when they rely on “simple rules” heuristics to perform significant activities like new product development and internationalization that nonetheless happens often. A further insight is that these “simple rules” can become the strategy of their firms. Fourth, more effective teams continuously organize the structures of their firms at the “edge of chaos”. Overall, top management teams emerge as central to the success (or lack thereof) of entrepreneurial firms.

Subfields: Accounting, Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a8830aac24f85eb447f0925a1c3d4add7a5c854

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. Jeffery S. McMullen
2. Yipeng Liu
3. Richard A. Hunt
4. Y. Xing
5. David M. Townsend
6. S. Sarasvathy
7. Shlomo Yedidia Y. Tarba
8. Thomas Neumann

In Management of Technology and Innovation

1. Jeffery S. McMullen
2. S. Sarasvathy
3. David M. Townsend
4. Richard A. Hunt
5. Nicholas S. Vonortas
6. Yannis Caloghirou
7. Y. Xing
8. Yipeng Liu

In Strategy and Management

1. Jeffery S. McMullen
2. Yipeng Liu
3. Nicholas S. Vonortas
4. Yannis Caloghirou
5. Richard A. Hunt
6. Y. Xing
7. David M. Townsend
8. S. Sarasvathy

Citations in the corpus

• Entrepreneurial team and strategic agility: A conceptual framework and research agenda (2020, background): “research in strategy and organization has shown that entrepreneurial teams (particularly at top level)—through their composition and their actions—can have a significant influence on the performance of entrepreneurial firms (Eisenhardt, 2013).”
• Determinants of young firms’ innovative performance: Empirical evidence from Europe (2017, background): “Second, it focuses on one type of resource that is particularly relevant for the innovative performance of young firms, which is the human capital encapsulated in its founders (Davidsson and Honing, 2003; Eisenhardt, 2013).”
• Entrepreneurial Team Cognition: A Review (2015, unknown): “By relying on ‘simple rules’ heuristics to perform significant activities such as new product development and internationalization (Eisenhardt 2013), entrepreneurial teams become more efficient.”
• Uncertainty, Knowledge Problems, and Entrepreneurial Action (2018, background): “In certain cases, “practicing analogical reasoning over many novel and complex problems increases reasoning capability” (Jones and Casulli, 2014:55) and simplifying heuristics ostensibly create the simple rules used to guide entrepreneurial action in complex environments (Davis et al., 2009; Eisenha”