Team composition influence on decision-making process: scientific and effectuative approaches

During the last years, the entire economic world participated in the continuous increase of new ventures launches, a trend surely supported by the lately introduced working ways in the high-technology industries. Indeed, every day many firms arise to follow the current agile growth rate of the global entrepreneurial ecosystem, trying to acquiesce to the high standards and competitive habits dictated by the market demand. Thus, a so quickly growing system implies an ever-increasing complexity in various aspects: extremely high competitiveness along several segments of customers, elevated complexity in understanding and applying technical discovers, ambiguous outcomes deriving from ability in gathering and interpretating data from heterogeneous and diverse sources, difficulty in elaborating the psychological and personal features coming from each individual personality and, therefore, finally the role that every CEO (or founder, or co-founder team, or decision-maker in general) has in the corporate success or collapse. In light of the above, this study (as many others present in literature) aims to investigate more deeply the potential patterns and frameworks existing in the way by which new firms (i.e. startup) arise, develop, and possibly die. One of the most relevant factors many scholars and researchers characterized as influencer of enterprise dynamics is mainly the decision-making process, involved in the birth and enhancement of the businesses, since such key circumstance is critical to adapt proactively the corporate attitudes and features to the market advancements, in terms of offering, marketing activities, as well as quality requirements, design, usability, cost structure and price. The entrepreneurial activities lead implicit high risks and deserved a deep study dedicated by a number of academics. Forlani and Mullins (2000), in instance, stated that the main components affecting entrepreneurial risk perception lie in three aspects, that are the investing sum of fund, potential loss and uncertainty of anticipated outcome (i.e., the more capital the new firm demands, the higher variability in expected result is assumed, therefore greater odds of economic losses and higher risk degree perceived by entrepreneurs. It is relevant keeping in mind that certain types of personality traits can account for the majority in a team, but strategic decisions require for not-individual processes: interactive discussion is needed (Ping, 2004), however considering that single influences (complying to common rules) affect overall outcome. In the recent literature two different currents established in the decision-making framework, in order to better interpret and draw the entrepreneurial attitudes: heuristic search (McGrath, MacMillan, 1995; Shepherd et al., 2012; Sarasvathy, 2001), among which emerged the Effectuation approach suggested by Sarasvathy (2001), and a more rigorous and systematic one, named scientific method (Eisenmann et al., 2013; Ries, 2011; Camuffo et al., 2017). This thesis project will focus on the two different standpoints just cited, since they represent the attempt to manage and accommodate a continuously evolving and complex economics, respectively by incessantly modelling (and adapting) the entrepreneur’s strategies to the scope on one side, and by implementing a rigorous (and faultless) method on the other side.