Challenges of Early Stage Entrepreneurs : the Roles of Vision Communication and Team Membership Change

We increasingly expect start-ups to tackle the great systemic problems of the world, with a rising demand for game-changing innovations that are both sustainable, responsible and economically viable. However, most of these ventures fail to realize their envisioned growth, or do not even survive their first four years of existence. This is because entrepreneurs face three hard-to-overcome: acquisition of financial resources, the attraction of talent and the organization of this talent into an effective team. In this dissertation, I espouse the roles of vision communication and the management of team dynamics in facing these three challenges. First, the dissertation investigates how entrepreneurs’ vision communication affects the way investors and potential recruits view the venture. Results point out that disruptive and social vision communication strongly affect their perception about the venture. Specifically, both types of visions may have unforeseen downsides in convincing investors and recruits to join the start-up’s pursuits. Second, we show that the management of team membership change is elementary to sustaining the high performance of venture teams. We find that both entrepreneurs and managers should attempt to minimize membership change in high performance teams. Overall, this dissertation provides numerous practical and academic contributions to the fields of entrepreneurship, impression management, vision communication and team dynamics.