Contextualizing founder identity in coworking spaces

Abstract

Coworking spaces–which combine an office workspace with a social space–enable collaboration, creativity and knowledge exchange, and offer opportunities to develop social and professional networks for users. Using a multilevel approach, we integrate data from two sources–at the level of the coworking space (N = 57) and the entrepreneur (N = 317)–and apply SEM to test our hypotheses. Our study finds that innovation-based narratives generated by coworking space providers significantly influence new venture growth for entrepreneurs within the space. The results also show that the alignment between the entrepreneur’s identity and the perceived social structure of a coworking space (the immediate entrepreneurial space) positively influences new venture growth. Taken together, we propose an extension to the founder identity literature by integrating psychological and sociological theories of identity to explain how the reciprocal relationship between context and identity is critical to new venture performance.