September 15, 2018

S. Venkataraman, Editor

Journal of Business Venturing

University of Virginia, PO Box 6550

Charlottesville, VA22906

Dear Dr. Venkataraman:

Thank you for your letter dated October 28, 2003. I was pleased to know that you have invited a revised resubmission of my manuscript for potential publication in Journal of Business Venturing.Please find enclosed three copies of the revised manuscript and three copies of myresponse to reviewers.

As you may notice, I have revised the manuscript by providing a more compelling entrepreneurial framing for the study and the findings by extensively modifying the introduction, theory development, data collection, and discussion sections. I have also provided a clear explanation ofthe operationlization of heterogeneity variables. Furthermore, I have used the sales growth information offered by only 29 firms to present evidence of the predictive validity of the team effectiveness. All these modifications were based on the comments made by the reviewers.

The new manuscript includes a theoretically grounded section explaining cognitive comprehensiveness. It provides bivariate correlation between team effectiveness and sales growth information of 29 firms and a factor analysis table presenting the separation between team commitment and cognitive comprehensiveness. The updated manuscript also explains the data collection and sample characteristics to show that the data are relevant to entrepreneurship.

In the enclosed statement to reviewers, please find my point-by-point response to the comments raised by the reviewers. As you can see, I agreed with most of the comments raised by the reviewers. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to the reviewers who identified areas of my manuscript that needed corrections or modifications. I would like also to thank you for allowing me to resubmit a revised copy of the manuscript.

I hope that the revised manuscript is accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Venturing.

Sincerely,

Sanjib Chowdhury

Department of Management

466 GaryM.OwenBuilding

Eastern MichiganUniversity
YpsilantiMI48197

oice: (734) 487-3240; FAX: (734) 487-4100

Statement to Reviewers

Reviewer Comments / Response
Reviewer One
1. Explain more about “Team Synergy” and “Cognitive Scope”. / I have decided to change the independent variable title from “breadth of cognitive comprehension” to “cognitive comprehensiveness”. I have provided a detailed description of this construct. I have provided multiple paragraphs developing cognitive comprehensiveness based on diverse cognitive abilities and team synergy. In addition to explaining cognitive comprehensiveness, I have provided brief definition of synergistic process and cognitive capabilities. These revised explanations are grounded in existing literature.
2. Explain more about how your heterogeneity measure is operationalized. What score does a team have if they are the same? / I agree that this section was not clearly explained in the original manuscript.
Explained in detail how I have operationalized the heterogeneity measures for age, gender, and functional background. I have presented the formula for Blau’s index and presented the number of categories for each demographic variable used to collect data. In addition, I have included examples of calculations of Blau’s index scores if members of a team belong to different categories of a variable or they belong to the same category. Please review the demographic heterogeneity measure section of the updated manuscript.
3. A much serious problem is that your team outcome measures appear to all be paper and pencil. Is there any hard data corroboration of teams’ performance, success such as profit, sales, etc.? / I agree with the reviewer.
The initial research design for this study included a performance measure of sales growth (Latest year to year growth). However, only 29 firms agreed to share the last two years sales information. Most of these firms are privately held and entrepreneurship research has acknowledged that entrepreneurs may be hesitant to share financial information for confidentiality reasons. Dess and Robins (1984) proposed that perceptual measures of performance are good substitutes for objective measures. In addition, previous research has shown self-reported measures of performance to be highly correlated with secondary data on performance (Venkataraman and Ramanujam, 1986). Also, several studies have successfully used paper and pencil approach to measure performance (Brown and Butler, 1995).
Moreover, I have performed a bivariate correlation between team effectiveness and sales growth for the 29 firms. The SPSS output is pasted below. I have included this information to suggest the predictive validity of my team effectiveness measure. Please review the team effectiveness measure section of the updated manuscript
Correlations
TESCORE / SALESGR
TESCORE / Pearson Correlation / 1.000 / .872
Sig. (2-tailed) / . / .000
N / 79 / 29
SALESGR / Pearson Correlation / .872 / 1.000
Sig. (2-tailed) / .000 / .
N / 29 / 29
** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
Finally, I have recognized this as an important limitation of this study.
4. It seems your measures of team commitment and team comprehension are highly related. / Component / Initial Eigenvalues / Extraction Sums of Squared Loadings / Rotation Sums of Squared Loadings
Total / % of Variance / Cumulative% / Total / % of Variance / Cumulative % / Total / % of Variance / Cumulative %
1 / 3.331 / 47.588 / 47.588 / 3.331 / 47.588 / 47.588 / 2.809 / 40.128 / 40.128
2 / 1.876 / 26.807 / 74.395 / 1.876 / 26.807 / 74.395 / 2.399 / 34.268 / 74.395
3 / .690 / 9.858 / 84.254
4 / .458 / 6.537 / 90.791
5 / .361 / 5.162 / 95.953
6 / .204 / 2.917 / 98.871
7 / .079 / 1.129 / 100.00
I have included a paragraph explaining that although team commitment and team-level cognitive comprehensiveness may be related, they are different constructs. In addition, a paragraph is included next to team-level cognitive comprehensiveness measure section presenting the results of a factor analysis with “varimax” rotation (also a factor loading table is provided that includes eigenvalue, % variance explained information), which show two separate constructs for team commitment and cognitive comprehensiveness.
In addition, the concern for multicolinearity was checked by VIF analysis and found that the VIF is well within the acceptable limit.
Reviewer Two
1. Less sure about the contribution to knowledge of entrepreneurship. This may simply be a reflection of the manner in which the findings are reported. / I have revised the manuscript by providing a more compelling entrepreneurial framing for the study and the findings by extensively modifying the introduction, theory development, and discussion sections grounded in additional citation from relevant entrepreneurship literature. Here are a few examples from the number of research on entrepreneurial teams that I have used: (Ensley, 1999; Gartner, 1985, 1990; Gartner, et al., 1994; Hansen, & Bird, 1997; Higashide & Birley, 2002; Lechler, 2001; Lyon, et al., 2000; Vesper, 1990; West & Meyer, 1997)
2. There was little in the paper to show that these were entrepreneurial firms. At very least, more background information is required. / I have also clarified the data collection section. The revised manuscript includes an additional paragraph on the criteria for selecting subjects for this study to ensure that the data and the findings are germane to entrepreneurship.

Reference

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Dess, G.G. and R.B. Robinson (1984), "Measuring Organizational Performance in the Absence of Objective Performance Measures," Strategic Management Journal 5, 265-274.

Ensley, M. D., Carland, J. C., Carland, J. W., & Banks, M. (1999). Exploring the existence of entrepreneurial teams. International Journal of Management, 16(2): 276-287.

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Lechler, T. 2001. "Social Interaction: A Determinant of Entrepreneurial Team Venture Success." Small Business Economics 16:263-78.

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