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 unfo

Recruiting Talent Through Entrepreneurs’ Social Vision Communication

For-profit social ventures are proliferating. They often communicate social visions, presenting an ideal future where the ventures resolve environmental or societal issues. We study whether social vision communication helps a startup to recruit talent—a fundamental problem for growth. We argue that jobseekers are less likely to apply to ventures communicating a social vision as they perceive reduced career advancement opportunities. We conducted two complementary studies to test our theory. Study 1 enlisted data from a job board for startups to show that ventures communicating a social vision receive 46.3% fewer job applications. Study 2 replicated this finding in a field experiment that further reveals the underlying mechanism: social vision communication limits jobseekers’ perceived career advancement opportunities. Both studies show that higher remuneration can compensate the negative effect of social vision communication. Our findings advance research on purpose-driven organizations, human resources, entrepreneurship, and vision communication to caution entrepreneurs against social vision communication as a recruitment strategy

Do disruptive visions pay off?

Entrepreneurs often articulate a vision for their venture that purports to fundamentally change, disturb, or re-order the ways in which organizations, markets, and ecosystems operate. We call these visions disruptive visions. Neglected in both the disruption and the impression management literature, disruptive visions are widespread in business practice. We integrate real options and impression management theories to hypothesize that articulating a disruptive vision raises expectations of extraordinary returns, which in turn increases the likelihood of receiving funding, but reduces the amount of funding obtained. A novel dataset of Israeli start-ups shows that a standard deviation increase in disruptive vision communication increases the odds of receiving a first round of funding by 22 percent, but reduces amounts of funds received by 24 percent. A randomized online experiment corroborates these findings and further shows expectation of extraordinary returns as the key mechanism driving investors’ sensemaking

Recruiting Talent through Entrepreneurs’ Social Vision Communication

For-profit social ventures are proliferating. They often communicate social visions, presenting an ideal future where the ventures resolve environmental or societal issues. We study whether social vision communication helps a startup to recruit talent—a fundamental problem for growth. We argue that jobseekers are less likely to apply to ventures communicating a social vision as they perceive reduced career advancement opportunities. We conducted two complementary studies to test our theory. Study 1 enlisted data from a job board for startups to show that ventures communicating a social vision receive 46.3 percent fewer job applications. Study 2 replicated this finding in a field experiment that further reveals the underlying mechanism: social vision communication limits jobseekers’ perceived career advancement opportunities. Both studies show that higher remuneration can compensate the negative effect of social vision communication. Our findings advance research on purpose-driven organizations, human resources, entrepreneurship and vision communication to caution entrepreneurs against social vision communication as a recruitment strategy

For Start-Ups Seeking Talent, a Lofty Purpose Can Backfire

Announcing that your firm has set out to make the world a better place can help you recruit employees—if your company is large and established. For new ventures, a social mission may actually be a drawback, making job candidates perceive that they offer fewer opportunities for success

For Start-Ups Seeking Talent, a Lofty Purpose Can Backfire

Announcing that your firm has set out to make the world a better place can help you recruit employees—if your company is large and established. For new ventures, a social mission may actually be a drawback, making job candidates perceive that they offer fewer opportunities for success

Recruiting Talent through Entrepreneurs' Social Vision Communication

The repository comprises data and R scripts for the two studies in our paper. You will find a folder specific to each study, with the datasets in XLSX format and the two scripts respectively including code for the descriptive parts and the analyses. Finally, there is a separate folder for custom written functions. If you use our R scripts for analyzing the data, ensure that the functions folder is accessible to the R scripts for loading