This project will explore the impact of the number of owner-managers in a business and its ambition, measured in a variety of ways, including growth expectations, export propensity and intensity, and innovativeness. It also looks at the impact of owner-manager education level and business complexity on this relationship.

The project will commence with a meta-analysis of studies linking team size to business performance. The project will then employ the combined 2004 to 2015 UK Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database to test hypotheses that link ambition and team size.

Previous work has tended to treat team size as a control variable (a constant throughout the course of the investigation), but research on cognitive and affective conflict within teams generates different hypotheses on the effects of team size on performance. This issue has not been satisfactorily tested empirically, with most studies being conducted in the US and on high technology firms.

We would expect the complexity of the business to affect the relationship between team size and ambition. Ambitious businesses in complex environments are more likely to need larger team sizes to address these complexity issues, and more highly educated owner-managers. The UK GEM database is large enough to test such hypotheses for both early-stage entrepreneurs and established entrepreneurs.