A Multi-dimensional Model of Venture Growth

We draw upon strategic management theory, organizational behavior theory, organization theory, and entrepreneurship models to form an integrated model of venture growth including 17 concepts from 5 micro/macro research domains. The model was tested with responses from 307 companies from the architectural woodworking industry. CEO's specific competencies and motivation, and competitive strategies, were direct predictors of venture growth. CEO's traits and general competencies, and the environment had significant indirect effects. Wiedenmayer, 1993) as isolated causes of venture performance. More recent studies propose that individual, organizational, and environmental dimensions combine to provide a more comprehensive prediction of venture development and growth than any one dimension in However, there has been limited examination of these multilevel models. Our purpose is to propose and test a comprehensive multilevel model of venture growth. As shown in Figure 2, five research domains were included that have been theoretically identified as antecedents of venture performance: personality traits and general motives; personal competencies; situationally specific motivation; competitive strategies; and the business environment. We chose venture growth as our performance measure, rather than other indicators of performance because entrepreneurship researchers point to growth as the crucial indicator of whether a multi-level model that sampled relevant concepts from individual, organizational, and environmental domains would predict firm performance successfully, (2) to test whether each domain would contribute something to the prediction, and (3) to explore alternative forms of the relationship among the domains and performance. By empirically examining multiple domains across multiple levels, we hope to produce a more complete understanding of venture growth. Traits and motives. Personality theories point to the importance of personal predispositions for venture success (McClelland, 1965), and venture capitalists report that entrepreneur characteristics are most important for venture success (MacMillan, Siegel, & SubbaNarisimha, 1985). Some traits and motives of successful entrepreneurs have been identified, but these concepts have typically produced weak (less than 7% of the variance) Furthermore, Sandberg and Hofer (1987) found that organizational and industry variables completely dominate individual-level variables as causes of venture success. There are three possible implications of these prior results: (1) traits do not matter; (2) traits do not work in isolation from other factors; or, (3) the wrong traits have been tested in past entrepreneurship studies. Our research design examines the second possibility. To control for the third we included additional traits in our study that have been proposed as characteristics of successful entrepreneurship theorists have proposed that …