On the organizational design of entrepreneurial ventures: the configurations of the entrepreneurial team

Abstract

Several studies claim that entrepreneurial ventures should pay attention to their organizational design in order to improve performance. However, a clear understanding of these ventures’ organizational design is still missing. In this paper, we borrow the key organizational design elements from the literature on established firms and we study them simultaneously to provide a first empirical overview on the organization of the entrepreneurial ventures. Specifically, we investigate whether and how organizational design elements cluster together in different organizational configurations. To do so, we analyze a sample of 255 Italian entrepreneurial ventures, focusing on their entrepreneurial team and on the most important organizational design elements: hierarchical structure, size, functional specialization, and allocation of decision authority. To this end, we first use t tests, ANOVA tests, and Scheffe post hoc tests to explore the associations between the organizational design elements and four contingency factors (i.e., entrepreneurial venture’s size, age, industry, and geographical location). Then, we adopt a two-step cluster analysis to understand whether and how the complementarities and interdependencies among organizational design elements give rise to organizational configurations. Results reveal the presence of three distinct configurations, which we named collaborative ET, centric ET, and professional ET.