Cyrine Ben-Hafaïedh and Shaul Oreg

Our focus in this project is on the role of team member value composition in driving entrepreneurial team outcomes. Many studies have been devoted to predicting entrepreneurial team performance. Among the predictors to have been considered is the composition of team member characteristics. To date, however, these have been mainly surface-level characteristics, such as member demographics. We therefore focus in this study on team members’ personal values, and the mechanisms that mediate their effects on team outcomes. We distinguish between competing and compatible values, and argue that whereas competing member values may be detrimental to team performance, holding compatible values will be beneficial to it. Moreover, we argue that team creativity and action-orientation mediate the effects of team value composition on team outcomes. We will test our theoretical framework with longitudinal data we will collect from 100 entrepreneurial teams, which we will access through new venture incubators in France.

Ari Dothan and Melike Findikoglu

To survive and prosper, firms must adapt to change by becoming resilient through the adoption of routines that balance between their stability and adaptability. While effective management practices support stability, the extent of entrepreneurial orientation in terms of innovation, risk taking and proactiveness increases adaptability. Hence, although perceived as mutually exclusive, these two mechanisms will likely complement each other in building resilience when integrated into a generative work environment that fosters learning and preparedness to encounter challenges. These mechanisms are also assumed to be affected by their embeddedness in co-ethnic and in mainstream markets. Building resilience is a crucial capability for ethnic minority-owned SMEs that face multiple disadvantages. Analyzing the phenomenon in two distinct samples (Arab-owned firms in Israel and Jewish-owned firms in Turkey), we aim to decipher the stability-adaptability paradox that is specific to the ethnic minority-owned SMEs and help increase, thereby, their organizational effectiveness.

Hamid Foroughi and Micki Eisenman

This project seeks to advance our understanding of managerial capitalism by examining how successful CEOs legitimate their extraordinary status, emolument, and accumulation of personal wealth. Specifically, it analyzes autobiographies written by prominent CEOs at the end of their careers and examines their attempts to shape the interpretations of their work, achievements, and life trajectory. It focuses on CEO’s representation of key episodes, such as turnaround, crisis, and successions, both consensual and conflictual. It applies a narrative analysis as well as rhetoric analysis to understand the ways in which CEOs construct the perception of their behavior in the context of these episodes and compares their presentation and interpretation of events to the reflections of these same episodes in the business press and key corporate documents such as annual letters to shareholders. As such, it builds on recent work examining rhetorical history as a legitimizing mechanism (Anteby& Molnar, 2012; Ocasio, Masukapf, & Steele, 2015; Strangelman, 2002; Suddaby, Foster, & Trank, 2010). More broadly, the study adds to the literature examining the social construction of the myth of CEO (Grint, 2005; Khurana, 2004).

Mohamad Sadri, Yuval Deutsch, Ithai Stern, and Caterina Moschieri

Reputational penalties and public salience are two mechanisms that explain the total effect of negative media coverage on the firm performance. While salience increases public awareness that might positively influence the firm performance, reputational penalties by critical stakeholders negatively affect the firm performance. Overall, the literature has provided a negative effect of negative media coverage on firm performance. This literature however, has overlooked industries where firms create value by producing harmful products. We argue that in such industries negative media coverage positively affects the firm performance. In other words, in contested industries firms do well by doingbad.

Isil Yavuz and Niron Hashai

Although it is well-acknowledged that R&D spending increases firm innovation, innovation is lot more than R&D and requires that R&D money is spent wisely. In our planned study, we aim to examine how different types of experiences of entrepreneurs influence the extent to which R&D money is well-spent and translates into innovation performance in startups. We use the KFS dataset to examine our ideas on a large number of startups overtime.  The results of the study intend to guide entrepreneurs in selecting their co-founders, investors in investing in innovative ventures and policy makers in helping increase innovation performance of startup companies.

Tammar Zilber and Deniz Tunçalp

In the past 30 years, institutional scholars adopted a translation model of institutionalization, assuming structures, practices and meanings are adapted into local contexts, as they move across borders. Currently, it is a given premise of institutional theory that the process of institutionalization involves not only adoption but also adaptation of institutions as they travel across temporal and spatial borders. In this study, we use the case of entrepreneurship education – entrepreneurship being a seemingly universal practice – to re-think the idea that institutionalization is context-bound. We will use both an historical case study of entrepreneurship education in higher education institutes in Turkey and Israel, as well as an ethnographic study of two entrepreneurship courses. We will ask which aspects of entrepreneurship education are based on seemingly global (or Americanized) understandings, and which – if any – get locally translated. Based on the empirical findings, we will contemplate the boundaries of institutionalization-as-translation.