30 Years of Entrepreneurial Team Research: Review and Suggestions for Developing the Field

This article provides a detailed review of entrepreneurial team (ET) research over 30 years across the fields of entrepreneurship, management, organizational science and psychology. 145 articles from 24 journals were identified, analyzed, and classified in the comprehensive, overarching Upper Echelons Input-Mediator-Outcome framework. This overview contributes by organizing ET research into its sub-domains, analyzing their historic developments and trends, providing guidance for positioning future research, and offering trend-based suggestions how the field can be further developed. Our analysis shows that 30 years ago, ET research was mainly concerned with the formation of ETs, and linking the founding team to venture success. During the last two decades, the focus shifted to deeper analyses of particular mediating variables, such as cognitive and affective emerging states. The most influential articles (by weighted citation) belong to the sub-domain of team composition, which has also become the most frequently studied field during the last 10 years. Authors around the world and from other scientific fields (especially management and organizational science) are now contributing to this domain, which was earlier confined mainly to entrepreneurship scholars from North America. The most widely addressed issues of concern are the lack of theoretical studies and longitudinal data, a bias towards the technology industry, the unavailability of primary data from new ventures, and conflicting findings, especially in the main trending sub-domain of team composition research and in particular on the impact of personality aspects and behavioural dynamics.