Keeping a keen edge: Social support among new venture team members and venture goal commitment

ABSTRACT

Some recent studies have focused on how social support explains the variability of entrepreneurs’ venture goal commitment. These studies have exclusively featured solo entrepreneurs, however, examining the support available to individuals from external ties, while neglecting the social support shared among team members in new venture teams (NVTs). Using data on 81 NVTs and 335 individuals from the Haier Entrepreneurship Platform in China, we investigated the effects of the level of support, perceived heterogeneity of support, and balance between instrumental and emotional support in NVTs on their members’ venture goal commitment. Overall, with variations for the two kinds of support, we found that all of these facets—the level and heterogeneity of the support, as well as the balance between instrumental and emotional support—affected venture goal commitment among NVT members.

KEYWORDS:

• New venture teams
• instrumental support
• emotional support
• venture goal commitment

Acknowledgments

Previous versions of the paper have been presented at the workshop held by the University of Southern Denmark and Nanjing University of Science and Technology in Kolding, Denmark, 2019. We are grateful to the workshop participants, including Martin Senderovitz, Mette Søgaard Nielsen and Gao Wu, for the valuable comments. We are also grateful for friendly reviews and comments on previous versions of the manuscript from Steffen Korsgaard, Jakob Schlichter, Jesper Raalskov, Justyna Starostka, and Majbritt R. Evald.

Disclosure statement

Author Ying Chen declares that she has no conflict of interest. Author Kim Klyver declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Notes

¹ Results are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council, The Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education (7059-00026B), and the Fujian Social Science Research Base (FJ2019JDZ014).