For Richer or Poorer, Better or Worse? Exploring How Conflict and Emotions Impact Start-up Team Separation

Entrepreneurship is an incredibly emotional journey, and nowhere are the emotional dynamics in a founder’s journey more pronounced than in founding teams. While research into founding teams has flourished in recent years, we know surprisingly little about how conflict and emotions interact in founding teams to impact the likelihood of a founding team separation. Yet practitioners rely on the metaphor of marriage to teach founders how to manage conflict and affect to avoid a team ‘divorce’, however no entrepreneurship research explores this metaphor empirically to assess the validity and appropriateness of comparing a founding team to a marriage. In this thesis, I argue that to explore these complex phenomena in a rich, nuanced way, we need to deviate from traditional theories and methodologies relied on in entrepreneurship research. Hence, I draw inspiration from marital research, and capitalise on recent technological advancements like artificial intelligence algorithms that monitor real-time valence and activation fluctuations throughout founding team interactions. I explore the role of conflict, affect and affective interactions that lead to co-founder exits and founding team separation in a novel way.
This thesis consists of three core articles that employ a range of methodological approaches to examine, and predict, how founding team dynamics lead to co-founder exits over the long run. I propose a theoretical framework that posits three main, interconnected findings. First, there are a range of affective responses throughout founding team conflict, and contrary to expectations, negative affect is not only expressed in relationship conflict, but also task and process conflict. Second, patterns of group affect and group cognition change the nature of team interactions, which in turn influence team conflict and resulting co-founder exits. Finally, rather than negative affect and relationship conflict predicting a cofounder exit, positive affect and task conflict are highly predictive of a founding team separation.
Taken together, in this body of work I contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial affect, entrepreneurial exits, and founding team conflict by challenging core assumptions about the deleterious role of negative affect and relationship conflict in founding teams. I introduce important new insights about what impacts founding teams in the long run: namely, how affective heterogeneity and ‘masked positivity’ increase the likelihood, and detriment of a co-founder’s exit.