Events

Prof. Yeonsin Ahn
Assistant Professor in Strategy and Business Policy
HEC Paris

Forming an atypical organizational culture is unusual and may require agreement among founding team members. We propose that startup teams with high diversity in the cultural legacies that co-founders bring from previous employers resolve cultural disagreements by converging to the culture that is already taken for granted, and hence have low atypicality. The convergence is amplified when the co-founders have similar power. However, teams with individual co-founders who are equipped with more diverse cultural elements can cultivate a more atypical culture by recombining elements. Furthermore, these co-founders can attenuate the cultural disagreements in a team and lessen the convergence to typicality, but only when they are the CEOs. These ideas are examined in an analysis of U.S. technology startup teams in CrunchBase and their parent organizations. We use 3.1 million employee reviews of the total technology company population from Glassdoor to identify the key cultural elements of technology companies over the past 12 years. The findings are consistent with the predictions. Implications for the study of startup culture, team diversity, and cultural recombination are discussed.