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| The Impact of Entrepreneurial Team Gender Diversity on the Business Model Innovation: Moderating Effect of Team Task Characteristics |
| Wu Xiaobo, Xu Hongqi, Zhao Minchao, Tan Ziyan |
| School of Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China |
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Abstract “Innovation and entrepreneurship” is not only one of the hotspots of China’s current social and economic development, but also an important topic in the field of academic research. For startups with relatively weak resources and capabilities, business model innovation as a new source of competitive advantage can help startups improve their performance. Therefore, it is particularly important to explore the driving factors of business model innovation of startups. Most of the previous researches on the mechanisms of business model innovation are based on the rational positioning school and the evolutionary school. They paid attention to the external factors driving business model innovation and ignore the proactive internal driving factors. This article is based on the cognitive school. From the perspective of managerial cognitive, this paper uses upper echelons theory to explore the impact of diversity of core entrepreneurial teams on business model innovation. In startups, as a type of team diversity, cognitive differences caused by gender diversity in entrepreneurial teams affect decision-making, and also lead to differences in leadership styles, information acquisition, and interpretation differences, which is important for business model innovation. Therefore, this study focuses on the impact of gender diversity on the innovation of business models in startups. Entrepreneurial enterprises have relatively weak resources and capabilities. In the task selection, dismantling, deployment and execution, the limited energy and attention distribution of the entrepreneurial team members need to be weighed to overcome the disadvantages of new entrants. Existing research shows that differences in team tasks not only affect the psychological behavior and cognition of leaders, but also affect the novelty and practicality of team creativity through different modes of communication, learning, and decision-making among team members, which in turn affects the novelty and practicality of team creativity. The entrepreneurial business model innovation has an impact. At the same time, because the entrepreneurial team is more flexible and proactive, the impact of the task differences of the entrepreneurial team will be more easily reflected in the operation and performance of the enterprise. However, the existing research on the business model of entrepreneurial enterprises pays less attention to the role of team tasks. Therefore, this study introduces the concept of team task characteristics to verify the impact of team task characteristics on the relationship between Gender diversity in entrepreneurial teams-business model innovation. In this article, we collected data from online and offline visits. We reviewed the situation of companies in various well-known startup parks and incubation platforms in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, and identified 841 startup companies that met the research standards. We randomly selected 400 companies as research samples and distributed questionnaires. Finally, we recovered 277 questionnaires with a recovery rate of 69.25%, of which 178 were valid samples. Taking 155 startups that meets the requirement of company age as a sample for analysis, the research results show that the higher the gender diversity in the startup team, the higher the novelty of the business model design of the startup. When the task interdependence is high, the positive relationship between the two will be weakened, and when the task complexity is high, the positive relationship between the two will be enhanced. The practical implication of this research for entrepreneurial enterprises mainly has the following two aspects: First, in the process of forming an entrepreneurial team, entrepreneurs can consciously recruit a certain proportion of heterosexual entrepreneurs to join the team, thereby obtaining a more reasonable team structure and to enhance the ability to innovate the business model innovation. Second, the design of team tasks also has an important impact on the innovation and capabilities of startups. When designing the team’s work tasks, the entrepreneurial team should consciously clarify the division of labor and reduce task interdependence to some extent. In teams with high task interdependence, pay attention to balancing the relationships within the team, consciously eliminate invalid conflicts, and improve team creativity and business model innovation capabilities; on the other hand, when facing more complex entrepreneurial tasks, more attention should be paid to the improvement of the team’s gender diversity, thereby enhancing the team’s innovation capacities.
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Received: 10 September 2019
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2021, Vol. 51 
