Getting along, getting ahead, and sometimes getting it wrong: A socioanalytic perspective on lead founder personality and team dynamics

New venture teams represent the dominant organizing structure in entrepreneurship, but research typically treats teams as collective entities or compositional inputs, which overlooks the potential influence of a lead founder. I argue that lead founder personality shapes new venture performance through team innovation and relationship conflict, with effects that shift across trait intensity from beneficial to detrimental. Using time-lagged, multi-source data (N = 136 lead founders and teams), I find that Machiavellianism and psychopathy show inverted U-shaped relationships with innovation and U-shaped relationships with conflict. Further, new venture performance effects are transmitted through two mediators: positive effects via innovation at lower trait levels and negative effects via relationship conflict at higher levels. In contrast, narcissism shows only a linear relationship with innovation and no association with relationship conflict. This study highlights the dual social functions of lead founder personality by identifying when “getting along” is a strategic path to “getting ahead” and when failing to manage that balance gets it wrong.