Don’t ruin a good thing; how employees may tarnish the new venture’s legitimacy

Purpose Building a new venture’s legitimacy can be considered an arduous task and maintaining that legitimacy is significantly important given the influence legitimacy has on access to scarce resources. There are many factors that may contribute to a new venture’s legitimacy and need to be investigated. The purpose of this paper is to explore how an entrepreneurial founder affects the legitimacy of a new venture and how employees may harm that legitimacy. Design/methodology/approach A review of the founder imprint, legitimacy and counterproductive work behavior literature was performed. Findings Based on a review of the literature, four testable propositions are developed. The first suggests that an entrepreneurial founder’s imprint will influence a firm’s legitimacy. The remaining propositions focus on how dysfunctional behaviors, which are often visible to the public given that they are reported in the media, may harm the development of the new venture’s legitimacy when employees engage in those behaviors. Originality/value The new venture literature has examined many drivers of new venture legitimacy; however, the literature lacks an examination of the impact an entrepreneurial founder’s imprint makes on the new venture’s legitimacy. Another important contribution to the entrepreneurship literature is the assertion that counterproductive work behavior may impact the founder imprint on the legitimacy relationship. The study of the issues presented in this paper aims to provide a framework that may spur new research on these topics which leads to a better understanding of these relationships.