Events

Prof. Steve Gray
Assistant Professor
McCombs School of Business
The University of Texas at Austin

Founding team members typically have a founder role identity while also having distinctive professional role identities (i.e., engineer, marketing). Drawing from role identity theory and research on organizational identity, we theorize that founding teams whose members strongly identify with the founder role are likely to experience more startup identity conflict. These negative effects can be mitigated, however, when founding team members strongly identify with their professional roles. We test our hypotheses using a multi-informant three-wave survey of 318 founders in 102 startups. Findings demonstrate that identifying with distinctive role identities (profession) limits the negative effects of identifying with a shared role identity (founder). We discuss implications for theory on multiple identities in founding teams, founding team conflict, and organizational identity.