Mechanisms of Self-leadership in Entrepreneurial Teams

Fast changing and highly dynamic global markets confront contemporary entrepreneurial teams with technologically complex and markedly uncertain situations. Entrepreneurship Centres undertake enormous efforts in their attempts to develop entrepreneurial teams for demanding innovation attempts. In this respect, the quality of social interactions of entrepreneurial teams is considered to be a crucial dimension for entrepreneurial team effectiveness and success. A frequently used instrument to facilitate the innovation process and the quality of social interactions is prototyping built on the concept of shared mental models. In a comparative case study, this work evaluates the teamwork of two entrepreneurial teams in an entrepreneurial team development programme by adopting the concept of effective teamwork mental models for self-managing work teams. It is argued that this concept is more comprehensive and especially suitable for the teams researched because it takes also the content of shared mental models into account. By means of this concept, a qualitative research paradigm and a context-mechanismphenomena conceptualisation, this work discovers the team phenomena present in both cases and explains the phenomena that are discovered by identifying the underlying mechanisms that have causally generated these phenomena. Eight mechanisms: (1) Time and Support (2) Leadership (3) Democratic Processes (4) Convergent Values and Attitudes (5) Trust (6) Target Attractiveness (7) Double Loop Learning (8) Friendship are empirically discovered and synthesised into a concept of enhanced entrepreneurial teamwork quality. In this manner, this project provides empirical evidence about possible ways to enhance the quality of entrepreneurial teamwork.