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Differences in Team vs. Solo Founders

As a company can be founded both by a solo founder but also by a founding team, the impact of this aspect is of interest. While most of the reviewed literature focuses on the lead founder’s personalities in team settings or simply solo founders, the impact of the personality ensemble in founding teams is less addressed.

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Only four of the 80 reviewed articles are specifically about the impact of team personality on start-up success.

Team Personality Composition

Founding team personality composition refers to the occurring personalities among team founders.

The reviewed literature states that the number of founders is positively correlated to the likelihood of start-up success. It can be explained by the increased likelihood of the team members exhibiting distinct personalities for teams of larger sizes, thus potentially complementing each other’s particular strengths.

However, these findings are not supported by literature not specifically focusing on founder personality and start-ups. The non-entrepreneurship literature postulates that smaller teams are more efficient, productive, and scalable.

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Of course, when only looking at the personality composition in teams, it seems reasonable that the more team members, the more same and different personality traits there are possibly complementing each other. Nevertheless, in a more practical context, other psychological factors play a role as well, eventually limiting team efficiency, productivity and with that performance. Yet, in this context, it must be noted, that the size of founding teams is inherently limited, while team sizes in general can be much higher. Thus, some of the negative effects found in the general literature might just not be applicable to start-up founding teams, as they almost never have the sizes necessary to feel these adverse effects.