在商言商?达尔文身份与新创企业绩效

Business is Business?Darwinian Identity and New Venture Performance

创业者达尔文身份遵循传统商业逻辑,以竞争框架为参考,体现了创业者的自我价值,是一种典型的、常见的创业者身份。现下创业者基本依赖于团队开展创业实践,基于此,本文主要考察了在商言商的达尔文身份通过财富态度与团队契约治理对企业绩效的影响。文章基于目标设定理论,利用经验数据进行检验,结果表明:创业者达尔文身份对企业绩效有直接的促进作用;达尔文身份的竞争目标参考框架提升了创业者对财富的迷恋、将财富视为成就和力量的程度,损害了企业绩效;达尔文身份为了更高效地达到目标,致力于明确契约治理,提升企业绩效;达尔文身份使创业者将个人成功与财富绑定而提升财富态度,挤占了团队成员人力资本激励调整的空间,导致契约治理水平下降,团队难以正常运行,最终损害企业绩效。本文打开了达尔文身份对企业绩效影响的“黑箱”,揭示了虽然有着明确目标的达尔文身份有助于提升绩效,但团队情境下其对财富的态度导致的契约治理问题可能阻碍新创企业成长。结论深化和拓展了创业身份研究,不仅启发创业者调整身份定位和态度,对投资者评估创业团队以进行相关决策亦有启示。

Based on the goal-setting perspective,and by constructing a chain mediation model in which entrepreneur Darwinian identity affects new venture performance via wealth attitudes and team contractual governance,this paper explores the internal mechanism of the impact of entrepreneur Darwinian identity on new venture performance.The conclusions are as follows:First,entrepreneur Darwinian identity has a direct contribution to firm performance.Second,the reference framework of Darwinian identity for competition goals enhances entrepreneurs’obsession with wealth and their view of wealth as achievement and strength,which damages firm performance.Third,Darwinian identity is committed to defining contractual governance and improving firm performance in order to achieve goals more efficiently.Fourth,Darwinian identity enables entrepreneurs to improve their wealth attitudes by binding personal success with wealth,which squeezes the space for team members to adjust their human capital incentives,leading to a decline in contractual governance,making it difficult for the team to operate normally,and ultimately damaging firm performance.Based on the above findings,the following insights are obtained:First,by recognizing the impact of entrepreneur Darwinian identity on team entrepreneurship,they can break through the formal entrepreneurial groups and give play to the real advantages of team entrepreneurship.Second,when improving the contractual governance of entrepreneurial teams,Darwinian identity entrepreneurs should also pay attention to the problem of decreasing incentive effect due to the over emphasis on wealth attitudes,so as to avoid the dilemma of entrepreneurial team management.Third,the findings can also be used as an important basis for investors to examine teams.Future directions include that:Further expand the scope of the survey sample to enhance the generalizability of the results;clarify the causal relationship between entrepreneur Darwinian identity and entrepreneurial team governance and new venture performance through the contextual experimental research;explore the issues of entrepreneur identity and team governance from the perspective of shared leadership,excluding the bias of individual team members and overcoming the difficulty of sampling caused by the specificity of entrepreneurial teams.The main contributions of this paper are that:It expands the boundary of entrepreneur Darwinian identity research by introducing team entrepreneurship as an important context into the research.From the perspective of social identity,it opens up the“black box”of the impact of Darwinian identity on firm performance,and reveals that although Darwinian identity has clear goals that help to improve performance,the contractual governance problems caused by wealth attitudes in the team context may hinder the growth of new ventures,which enriches the research on the antecedent variables of entrepreneurial team governance and new venture performance.It breaks through the limitation of single role and helps to clarify the multiple roles of entrepreneur Darwinian identity on new venture performance,beyond the limitations of a single role.