Autonomy forms a vital ingredient for entrepreneurship. In new ventures pursuing ambitious projects, however, excessive individual autonomy can undermine the coordination needed to envision, generate, and implement innovative solutions. This tension is especially acute in early-stage teams, which lack the formalized structures and collective norms and routines that typically guide behavior in more established organizations. If so then, what determines the limits of autonomy to foster innovation? To better understand this question, we draw on situation strength theory to reconceptualize autonomy not only as an individual capability to make independent decisions determined by the formal characteristics of one’s organizational functions, responsibilities and tasks, but also as a capability determined by the relative “strength” of the situations where members of the new venture teams operate. We then develop hypotheses regarding the diminishing influence of autonomy on new venture team's innovativeness and the moderating influence of an important situational cue for members of a new entrepreneurial team: the person of the lead founder. In the first study, we find that individual autonomy is beneficial to team innovativeness, but only until a certain threshold, after which the positive effects begin to diminish. In the second study, we find that lead founder personality constructs the team’s situational strength, shaping both the optimum point of this autonomy-innovativeness relationship and the sharpness of the decline. Our work challenges assumptions about the universally beneficial effects of autonomy in entrepreneurial settings and offers a theoretical explanation for why similar levels of autonomy may produce different innovation outcomes across new venture teams.
Denis A. Grégoire is Professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at HEC Montréal and Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal. His research centers on the cognitive processes influencing the identification of innovative ideas for new entrepreneurial ventures, entrepreneurs’ decision to expand their firm’s activities to foreign markets, and the contribution of angel investors to the growth of high-potential ventures.
Further information about the reference school, are found in website: High Commercial Studies of Montreal - HEC di Montreal.
The seminar will be held in English.
Major information: Leonardo Corbo (leonardo.corbo@unibo.it).