Open Workshop: Intractable Conflict Diversity in Entrepreneurial Teams
The aim of the Open Workshop Series in Business and Management Studies is to promote top-quality academic and applied research in various fields of the social sciences. This is a unique opportunity for sharing knowledge and networking with local and international community members.
Speaker: Dr Vita Kadile, Leeds University Business School, UK
Diversity has increasingly become a topic at the forefront of efforts in companies across the globe to create inclusion and enable organizational effectiveness. It is highly sought after on boards, in top management teams, and at all levels of organizations. Though the benefits diversity can bring to teams are well-established, managing diverse teams is fraught with challenges that have increasingly attracted scholarly attention. Diversity includes differing characteristics among individuals along a variety of dimensions, including those visible on the ‘surface-level’ such as demographic characteristics, and the ‘deep-level’ dimensions that are less readily apparent (such as personality traits, preferences and values). This study focuses on diversity in entrepreneurial founding teams, where diversity by design can have a strategic impact.
Through a real-time, longitudinal assessment of entrepreneurial team formation, we develop a conceptual framework for understanding a previously understudied form of deep-level diversity: intractable conflict diversity, resulting from severe, long-lasting, and unresolvable ethnonational conflict between groups with costly implications for the societies involved. Our research follows the formation process of a group of entrepreneurial teams founded by Israeli and Palestinian co-founders as they went through an 8-month accelerator program and the dynamics of two diverse teams for an additional year. Using a multi-method case study approach (involving interviews, documentary analysis, and observations), this study offers insights into the drivers of long-term viability of entrepreneurial founding teams with intractable conflict diversity.
Dr Vita Kadile is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Leeds University Business School in the UK. While her teaching predominantly focuses on research methods for marketing, her research expertise lies in cognitive and behavioural entrepreneurship, investigating business start-ups, international and strategic marketing. Her work has been published in various entrepreneurship, management and marketing journals (e.g., ISBJ, JSBM, IMM, TFSC). She has received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research Impact beyond Academia in 2016 for her work on an international franchising project with a UK-based retailer where the findings have informed the development of improved managerial practices and resulting organisational change.
Vita has served as an Assistant Managing Editor at the Journal of International Marketing for 6 years and has organised and chaired special sessions at the AMA Global Marketing SIG conferences in 2018 and 2022. Recently, she has been working on developing several entrepreneurship courses for Goldman Sachs as part of their online programme (the Innovation Strategy course is currently available on Coursera). Vita’s consultancy work primarily deals with market research and entrepreneurial competencies.
Discussion moderated by Prof. Arnis Sauka.
Attendance is free of charge.
Please sign up for the seminar, writing to arnis.sauka@sseriga.edu by February 23, 2023.
The aim of the SSE Riga Open Workshop Series is to:
- Foster cooperation between business and management researchers, practitioners and policy makers, as well as
- To promote academic and applied research in various fields of the social sciences, focusing on but not limited to entrepreneurship, marketing, management, public administration and strategy.
Organised by the Centre for Sustainable Business at SSE Riga and supported by ESI student innovation program. The program is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and supported by Printify, SEB Latvia, and Rimi Latvija. Project number: 1.1.1 .3/21/A/008.a.
