How would autonomist and autocratic teammates affect individual satisfaction on prefounding entrepreneurship teams?

ABSTRACT

We explore how differentially autonomous and autocratic teammates affect each other’s exposure to conflict and then satisfaction on prefounding entrepreneurship teams. Data from venture creation courses show that preferences for freedom (from rules) and discretion (over one’s job) each have their unique interactive effects, when assessing one’s own preferences in light of teammates’ preferences. High teamwide preference for independence was not linked to satisfaction, but one’s preference for independence interacts with actual interdependence to affect it. High teamwide preference to lead autocratically increases task conflict and diminishes satisfaction. Overall we find that conflict plays no role as a mediating variable.

KEYWORDS:

• Personal values
• shared leadership
• cofounders
• self-management
• power
• team formation
• collectiveness
• authority

Notes

¹ A large empirical study by Wasserman (2012) shows that, besides autonomy, authority plays a big role in motivating a large percentage of entrepreneurs. Specifically, he finds that autonomy and power are the top two motivators (out of 13 total) for male entrepreneurs in their 20s through 40s; and female entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s.

² Wasserman (2012, p. 119) finds that founders regularly complain, “Everyone wants to be CEO.” He reports one founder admitting, “I have noticed that we are all trying to jockey for the leader role.”

³ The mediation of an interaction is a concept that sees little exposure in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, the first instance of this concept is spelled out in Baron and Kenny’s (1986) seminal piece on p. 1179. Their description of the idea is as we have utilized it.

⁴ Power-sensitive members do not always wrestle each other for power. Changes in strategy or environment generate external resource threats or internal team dynamics that serve as triggers (Van Bunderen et al., 2018). When teammates are all sacrificing their effort and investing their (specialized) human resources for a venture with an unknown future, entrepreneurial survival may function as such a trigger.

⁵ Examples of venture ideas tackled during the program were a stylish personal pouch for diabetes health care, a nutritional effervescent drink tablet for college students, and stickers designed to beautify and draw attention to emergency equipment in office settings.

⁶ Because entrepreneurship teams can be so informal, we prefer using the word “work” to describe each team member’s set of tasks. However, the literature heavily focuses on “job satisfaction.” Thus we use the phrase “satisfaction with work/job/role” interchangeably.

⁷ As evidenced by Schjoedt (2009), Hackman and Oldham’s (1976) task identity variable was actually not found to be relevant to job satisfaction on entrepreneurial teams. He hypothesizes that entrepreneurs may not experience the end of a task or its viable outcome due to constantly handing off completion of tasks to others (i.e., one’s employees). For this kind of reason, it is not included in our analysis.

⁸ Status conflict, or disputes over people’s relative status positions in their group’s social hierarchy (Bendersky & Hays, 2012), was not considered an issue since virtually all members of the teams were similarly aged culturally similar university students with essentially no work experience.

⁹ For example, Steers and Braunstein (1976) measure both need for autonomy and need for dominance, and one item is “I go my own way at work, regardless of the opinions of others.” When such preference involves steering the entire organization in the face of resistance, we consider this to reflect an authoritative disposition.

¹⁰ We also considered that our authority-oriented variables should be handled via random slopes, due to the difference in power distance for Korea versus the Netherlands. However, when we compared correlation coefficients of these variables for our Korean versus Dutch data via z-scores, we found no meaningful difference and thus little reason to consider this for our model.

¹¹ Respect for authority showed up mildly statistically significant in our data. One’s respect for authority (p < .01) and teammate respect for authority (p < .005) both related to diminished satisfaction with one’s job, with no counteracting interaction effect.