The Impact of the Entrepreneurial Team on the Scalability of Startups

Growth is a prerequisite for startup survival and scalability is a tool to facilitate growth and ensure startup survival. Startup scalability is influenced by many factors such as entrepreneurial teams. Despite the significant role of entrepreneurial teams in the growth and scalability of startups, in previous research, this factor has not received much attention. Accordingly, the present study examines the impact of entrepreneurial teams based on variables of diversity and team trends. Variables related to team diversity include demographic factors that include age, gender, and performance background, and variables include team process, team-level cognition, team commitment, team size, and team integrity. This research is applied from the perspective of purpose and the data collection method is descriptive-correlation. Data collection tool is a questionnaire that was distributed and tested among managers of 90 startups by random sampling method. The data obtained from this study were analyzed using path analysis and SmartPLS software. Cronbach’s α for all variables was higher than 0.7 and the mean value of variance extracted was higher than 0.5 and the validity and reliability of the structures were confirmed. The results of our study suggests that both diversity and team process variables are important for scalability of a startup. Also, it suggests that demographic characteristics and cognitive comprehensiveness have the greatest impact on startup scalability and team integrity, respectively.