Conflicts in start-ups: coping with stress and conflicts to promote well-being and entrepreneurial success

Project Information

Starflict

Grant agreement ID: 745947

DOI

10.3030/745947

Project terminated on 19 January 2020

EC signature date 27 March 2017

Start date 8 February 2018

End date 7 February 2020

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 160 800,00

EU contribution

€ 160 800,00

Coordinated by

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Starflict (Conflicts in start-ups: coping with stress and conflicts to promote well-being and entrepreneurial success)

Reporting period: 2018-02-08 to 2020-02-07

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

• What is the problem/issue being addressed?

Start-ups are considered the Europe 2020 Priorities to strengthen Europe’s economic and job growth. Keeping with the Small Business Act (SBA) principles, the EC Entrepreneurship Action Plan aims at supporting entrepreneurs in creating new businesses and ensuring more supportive environments for start-ups, so they can thrive and grow. Despite the success stories of the transformative power of startups and large investment into fostering start-ups’ creation and entrepreneurship in incubators, about 50% of new European businesses fail during their first five years. Post-mortem testimonies of failed startups indicate conflicts between founders and effects of work stress as two of the top reasons for this failure. However, the antecedents of start-ups’ failure and entrepreneurial success are largely under-studied.

• Why is it important for society?

Start-ups as other small businesses are particularly vulnerable to high levels of work stress, and poor working conditions. One of the most important hindrances to health and well-being is stress, strongly connected to the experience of conflicts at work. Although start-ups’ founders burst with enthusiasm and see their start-ups as full of challenges, start-ups are an extremely fertile ground for conflicts and hindering distress which are costly and even can be deadly. Work stress often provokes sleep deficiency that goes hand in hand with poor mental health and performance, frequent cardiovascular diseases, and even death that all cost Europe €617 billion annually. However, research on the issue of conflict and stress in start-ups is scarce. With this in mind, understanding how to maintain well-being and promote quality of working life, while working efficiently and effectively is an important goal for society and economy.

• What are the overall objectives?

The general objective of STARFLICT was to elaborate a typology of conflicts in start-ups, develop an assessment tool for conflicts in start-ups, identify early indicators of start-up’s gain- and loss- spirals that lead to well-being and entrepreneurial success, and offer practical guidelines for start-ups on how to effectively deal with conflicts and stress using individual (e.g. reducing sleep deprivation) and group-level coping strategies.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work performed within this project includes: (1) General planning & management, with periodic meetings (supervisor, PhD student, start-up incubators, start-up teams); (2) Elaboration and refinement of measurement instruments, such as semi-structured interviews and questionnaires; (3) Data collection including: 100 semi-structured interviews, 71 baseline questionnaires from startup members, actigraphy measurement from 115 startup members, daily and weekly questionnaire data from 115 startup members, 68 HCC samples, and Heart Rate Variability from 79 participants; (4) Data analysis; (5) Dissemination; (6) Communication to entrepreneurship incubators, startup members, undergraduate and doctoral students; and (7) Training, especially in qualitative data analysis, handling intense datasets, and communicating science for broader public.

The work carried out within the project allowed to develop five studies that yielded relevant results for our research questions. The results suggest that there exist different conflict issues in startup top teams that can be classified in meaningful categories (Study 1) and measured using a psychometrically-sound scale (Study 2). Also, we show that the perception of conflict in startup top teams over time are positively related to Hair Cortisol Concentrations (HCC) during the same period (Study 3). We also show a causal “negative conflict spiral” in which conflict exacerbates stress experience, leading to impaired sleep, which further fuels conflict next day (Study 4). Finally, we show that problem-solving coping behaviour and problem-focused coping are effective strategies that allow to decouple task conflict from relationship conflict, while avoiding conflict behaviour and detachment coping exacerbate their positive relationship (Study 5).

Project activities have been disseminated to reach different group of stakeholders that may benefit from the project’s results: (1) International researchers via preparing scientific manuscripts that have been submitted to peer-reviewed journals and presenting work at international congresses; (2) Students undergraduate and doctoral), by carrying out an informative workshop and research seminars; and (3) Start-up founders, entrepreneurs and innovation community by organizing short seminars for startups, infomeetings with startup incubators, and offering reports (global, team-level, and individual) to startups.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The Starflict project contributes to the state of the art in several ways. The results obtained during the project include developing a deeper understanding of conflict issues among start-up co-founders, psychological and physiological consequences of conflicts, as well as knowledge on the factors that either buffer or exacerbate conflict escalation. These results can inform both scholarly and practical entrepreneurship and organizational behavior literature, as well as practical interventions. First, they allow for a better understanding of the antecedents of everyday interactions of start-up co-founders that may sustain destructive dynamics leading to start-up failure or that nurture constructive ones boosting start-up entrepreneurial success. Also, the integration of theories of conflict with psycho-biological theories of stress advances knowledge on stress, dynamics of conflicts, and expand literature on entrepreneurship. We contribute to the literature on interpersonal conflict by exploring unmapped physiological effects of long-term conflict, that are often unavoidable in the day-to-day work of high-performing teams. Finally, we add to the literature on conflict management and entrepreneurship by taking a comprehensive perspective and including coping strategies conceptually related to conflict behaviors, both at individual and team-level, as moderators in this relationship.

Regarding potential impact of the STARFLICT, this project directly and indirectly helps to create new market opportunities, as well as strengthen competitiveness and growth of startup companies. First, the participants in this project (startup founders) have already reported positive impact of their participation on their team dynamics and well-being. Also, this project has built foundations for filing a new innovative project aimed at creating practical interventions in startup top teams. Startups, startup incubators, and startup coaches or mentors alike can incorporate such targeted interventions in their programs to provide startup members with a toolbox to navigate through the highly exciting yet challenging work environment of a startup business. In this way, the MSCA Starflict project directly and indirectly helped to enhance innovation capacity, create new market opportunities, as well as strengthen competitiveness and growth of startup companies, which brings benefits to the society and economy.

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