Trust in entrepreneurial teams: The role of team narratives

Abstract

Although trust within the entrepreneurial team is critical for its success, we have limited insights into the antecedents of a founder's trust in the team. Taking a social information processing perspective, we theorize how entrepreneurial team narratives can play an important role in building a founder's cognition-based trust in the team. We hypothesize that the team-level structural dimensions of diversity and distinctiveness of topics in entrepreneurial team narratives are positively related to a founder's cognition-based trust in the team and that these relationships are less positive when the founder perceives higher levels of resource scarcity. To test our hypotheses, we apply an automated topic modeling approach to quantitatively analyze interview and survey data from 102 founders across 43 complete entrepreneurial teams. Our study has implications for research on trust in entrepreneurial teams and entrepreneurial narratives, as well as methodological implications for using topic modeling to analyze other texts in entrepreneurship research.