Rufasha, K

This study investigates the role of teams in venture growth by focusing on how patterns of team roles and actions explain venture growth. The role of venture teams (relative to individuals) in managing new venture growth is receiving increasing recognition in studies of entrepreneurship and economic development. Generally, many studies tend to focus on why new ventures fail to grow. And where studies of venture teams do exist, they tend to show that teams achieve higher growth rates, on average, than individual entrepreneurs. But, there are still rather few studies that examine in depth the processes through which teams work together.

 

The analysis presented here is based on five growing firms in Zimbabwe. The findings that emerged from this qualitative study highlighted five key issues that growing firms in many different socio-economic contexts face. These growth issues are: start-up and growth capital, opportunities, human capital and delegation, internal controls and external risks/threats. From the cross case analysis of team roles, it is found that these issues are resolved in particular ways which can be categorised in seven ways. Firstly, it is claimed that team ventures are more able to transcend or minimise growth stage crises because of their capacity to formalise structure/systems early in the emergence process. Secondly, venture teams engaged professional management practices and organisational features at early stages of venture founding using them to facilitate growth. In so doing, teams compress the growth cycle because of the opportunity for team members to perform tasks concurrently. Thirdly, teams endow new ventures with institutional credibility to attract resources and customers. And, fourth, teams exhibit high levels of innovation using multiple team roles to realise business ideas and opportunities. Fifth, working in teams enhances the creativity of individuals through social facilitation because this regulates behaviour and stretches their various efforts. Sixth, it is shown that teams can use network nodes that are more than the sum of the individual network nodes of the team members because they add team level networks. Finally, it is claimed that teams act as self-governance systems.

 

In summary, it was because the ventures contradicted, rather than conformed, to the conventional models of new firm growth that team venture growth was achieved with relative ease in all the five cases

A cross-case analysis of the role of teams in venture growth

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