The Contingent Effect of Team Composition on the Performance of Entrepreneurial Teams

Despite the continuous interest in studying entrepreneurial teams, the relationship between team composition and, particularly, team diversity and performance remains fertile ground for active debate. Taking roots in the knowledge-based view and organizational learning literatures, this chapter argues that performance in entrepreneurial teams is contingent on (a) the overlap between team members’ knowledge/competences and the content of the performed tasks, (b) the duplication of the team members’ knowledge in the areas with that content, (c) the nature of tasks (exploration or exploitation), (d) the team’s flexibility to adapt to changes in the content and nature of those tasks, and (e) the rate of environmental change. Because an important source of ambiguity in the understanding of how team diversity and performance are linked ties to issues of how team diversity is conceptualized and operationalized, the chapter also proposes a new way of looking at diversity in future research.