Division of labor in startups: the effect of roles and personality traits on team effectivenes

Abstract

The division of labor is a fundamental characteristic in each type of society to be defined as such, without division of labor a set of individuals would remain merely a set of individual, lacking the feature that differentiates it from the concept of society: the ability to reproduce and prospering. These features belong to startup’s definition too, in which reproducibility and prosperity are summarized in the fundamental characteristic of startups: the growth pursued jointly by a team. In every situation in which a problem must be solved from a group, a division of labor emerge to ensure that such work is carried out in the best way: to lighten the workload distributing among the various components of group, for take full advantage from the skills of each of them and for maximize the efficiency and speed of work. This work will analyze what is the division of labor and how happen in a small group such as startup’s team, what are technological and cognitive factors that affect the division of labor and how to choose between a task’s partition or another. Going deeply, we will analyze how personality affect the social dynamics among the components of group and how this, affect the productivity of the team, because startup’s team must take the right decision jointly to pursue growth and a common decision is a product of communication among team’s members in base of communication patterns. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that these patterns emerge as a consequence of personality of group members and, at the same time, that personality define who will be the leader and what are the sub-groups (coalitions). The goal of the study is to quantify these two variables, personality, and communication patterns, in order to establish a general model to prevent mistakes in terms of communication and definition of roles. Methodology: Basing on Italian normative definition, the startup must have “…as prevailing or exclusive corporate purpose, the development, production and commercialization of innovative or high tech products or services”, however such definition alone is limiting for the research’s aims of this work, we will refer also to another wider definition, the one provided by “U.S. Small Business Administration”, the US government agency in charge to enabling the establishment and viability of small businesses, which consider startups as a company that is typically technology oriented and has high growth potential. We will use both definitions cited above: the Italian one for simplify the access to database for creating the sample to be studied; the American one for define, from a sociological point of view, the interaction of individual in a group for creating and develop an idea, with the final goal of growth, through efforts of each individual component. Through collaboration of 14SPM a network of professionals with whom I collaborate, and PugliaSviluppo a company owned by Regione Puglia, I will collect data through interviews and surveys of many startup's teams in order to create a significant dataset to understand how personality of members affect the definition of roles and the effectiveness of the teams.