Fatal attraction: A systematic review and research agenda of the dark triad in entrepreneurship – The dark triad has been getting a lot of attention in the recent years. It refers to these three related traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. In this review in the field of entrepreneurship, the researchers find that people who score high on the dark triad are likely to be drawn to entrepreneurship. This is unsurprising since these individuals can thrive in highly competitive and ambiguous environments where questionable tactics are allowed or even rewarded. Despite having high entrepreneurial intention, however, those who score highly in psycopathy and Machiavellianism do not seem to have ventures that perform as well. While they can get a way in one-off transctions, business is built on trust and thus, disincentivizes destructive behaviors over time.
Adaptation or Persistence? Emergence and Revision of Organization Designs in New Ventures – quite an extensive study on how organization designs (task division, task allocation, reward distribution, information exchange and exception management) evolve over time. Tracking eight ventures, they find that the founders tend to entrench their logics of organizing despite feedback indicating that they should not. What they tend to update frequently however are the design solutions, though these changes are incremental.
The impact of managerial job security on corporate entrepreneurship: Evidence from corporate venture capital programs – managers won’t risk doing something so innovative if it would cost them their jobs. As the study finds: “firms are more likely to launch a CVC program after their state enacts antitakeover protection.” Although it may seem that guaranteeing job security may make people more complacent, this study finds that it would actually make people experiment more.