Personality composition and performance in entrepreneurial teams: understanding the impact of stability and plasticity traits in a relative contribution model

Considering that personalities of entrepreneurs are diverse, we examine how the personality composition of entrepreneurial teams affects team performance. Given the specific challenges of the entrepreneurship setting, we suggest a new understanding of the team composition-team performance link by (1) taking a meta-perspective to personality that considers the stability vs. plasticity underlying the Big Five traits and by (2) applying a relative contribution (minimum/maximum) conceptualisation of team composition. We conduct a quantitative study with 104 entrepreneurial teams. Our findings indicate that high entrepreneurial team performance requires all team members to have minimum levels of stability-related traits (agreeableness, emotional stability, conscientiousness), but only one team member with high plasticity-related traits (openness, extraversion).