– Personality and previous relations play a greater role than what has been brought forward earlier. Entrepreneurs are more inclined to venture out with someone they trust rather than someone who might have better credentials, says Karin Hellerstedt PhD Candidate in Business Administration at JIBS.
Karin Hellerstedt has by studying different compositions of groups – e.g. how colleagues enter and exit the group – been able to show differences in group dynamics in newly formed companies. Different factors affect the results; both on individual and firm level. Through utilising data on company and individual levels Hellerstedt has been able to produce new variables on team level.
– Furthermore the teams seem to come in to existence rather than be created. Time is probably not spent actually going out to find new team members to start the business with, says Karin Hellerstedt.
The study was enabled by data from Statistics Sweden (SCB) and it shows that attributes associated with status often affect the group’s stability. A typical newly founded group hardly ever matches the textbook groups and Karin Hellerstedt recommends a revision of the advice given those individuals who are contemplating starting their own companies as the texts now seem mechanical.
Karin Hellerstedt will be participating in this year’s ERSA Congress. This assembly is the 50th Anniversary of the ERSA (European Regional Science Association) congress. ERSA has some 3 500 members, both academics, policy professionals and researchers, in 17 active associations across Europe. ERSA is one of the 3 supra-regional associations of RSAI (Regional Science Association International).
