Thread by @IHLuminate

Happy to share my new paper "Organizing Entrepreneurial Teams: A Field Experiment on Autonomy over Choosing Teams and Ideas" with Tia Boss, @linusdahlander and Rajshri Jayaraman, which is now in print in Organization Science pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.12….
What motivated us … (1/n)

(2/n) Early-stage entrepreneurship is organized in many different flavors nowadays, in the green field as well as within and across corporate boundaries. Think of new organizational forms such as company builders, incubators, accelerators or hackathons.

(3/n) These new forms differ in terms of underlying organizational design principles: (a) how tasks are determined and (b) how they are allocated to people. Both design problems can be solved through "managerial" assignment, or through "entrepreneurial" autonomy & self-selection.

(4/n) Thus, in organizing early-stage entrepreneurship, teams can be granted autonomy over choosing a business idea to work on and/or over choosing team members to work with, or be assigned to a idea and team members.

(5/n) To study the separate & joint performance effects of these two sources of autonomy compared to a baseline of (randomly) assigned ideas and team members, we run a (framed) field experiment with 939 students in 310 teams during a #leanstartup course over 11 weeks.

(6/n) Results show that the effect of choosing ideas is significantly stronger than the effect of choosing teams. Performance gains vanish for teams that are granted full autonomy over choosing both ideas and teams, which suggests the two forms of autonomy are substitutes.

(7/n) Causal mediation analysis reveals that both main effects can only partially be explained by a better match of ideas with team members’ interests and prior network contacts among team members.

(8/n) Thus, granting autonomy also seems to induce unobserved (to us) changes to team inputs (e.g. “procedural utility” & additional effort) and the way these inputs are transformed into team performance (e.g. more efficient & effective coordination).

(9/n) While homophily and lack of team diversity cannot explain the performance drop among teams with full autonomy, our results suggest that self-selected teams fall prey to overconfidence and complacency too early to fully exploit the potential of their chosen idea.

(n/n) Feedback from respected colleagues so far has been encouraging as they teach and apply our findings in the classroom. Thanks also to our SI editors Oliver Schilke, @sslevine, @OleniaOlenka, Lynne G. Zucker and three helpful anonymous reviewers. @TUHamburg @esmtberlin