Conflict haunting in entrepreneurial teams: entrepreneurial bricolage and competitive environment

Purpose The dysfunctional effects of relationship conflict have sparked extensive research; however, entrepreneurial teams have received skimpy attention in comparison to ordinary workplace teams, making more exploration of how relationship conflict in an entrepreneurial context impacts firm performance urgent and necessary. Combining the model of motivated information processing in groups and entrepreneurial bricolage theory, we propose entrepreneurial bricolage as the key to bridging relationship conflict and entrepreneurial performance with a competitive environment, setting a crucial boundary condition. Design/methodology/approach Data collected by a 2-wave survey from 279 entrepreneurial teams in China were utilized to test our proposed model. Findings The results revealed that relationship conflict would hinder entrepreneurial performance via reducing entrepreneurial bricolage. The competitive environment was found to aggravate the dysfunctional effect of relationship conflict on entrepreneurial bricolage and set a boundary condition for the mediating role of entrepreneurial bricolage such that the relationship was stronger under higher levels of entrepreneurial competitive environment. Originality/value This study advances the contextualized knowledge of how relationship conflict influences entrepreneurial performance in terms of entrepreneurial team resource utilization and elaborates on the moderating effects that entrepreneurial environment plays on the linkage between relationship conflict and entrepreneurial bricolage. In addition, by including conflicts in the nomological network of entrepreneurial bricolage, this study also enriches the accumulated knowledge of studies on the antecedents of entrepreneurial bricolage.