The Effect Of Team Entrepreneurial Cognition On The Entrepreneurial Decision

New venture creation needs kinds of resources and opportunities, and team owned resource is relative more than individual's, which increases the possibility of success. The uncertainty and risks of entrepreneurship are much higher than past due to fierce competition, information explosion and technology shifting. Team entrepreneurship reduces the disadvantages throughout the entrepreneurial process and becomes a more and more popular way of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial process is always accompanied by a series of decision-making, which is also an important research area of entrepreneurship study. More and more scholars pay attention to the team entrepreneurship, so the study of Team Entrepreneurial decision (TED) has both theoretical and practical significance.Through the theory review, it shows that the effect of entrepreneur cognition on the entrepreneurial decision has been extensively studied and confirmed on the individual level. Based on this, this study discusses the influence factor of entrepreneurial decision also from the entrepreneurial cognition perspective. However, entrepreneurial cognition research on the group level is relative few in the existing studies, so team entrepreneurial cognition (TEC) is one part of this research. Then, this study chooses the Entrepreneurial Opportunity Recognition (TOR) as the mediator to explore the effect mechanism of TEC on TED and also the moderating role of Entrepreneurial Team-efficacy (ETE) played during this relationship. This study tries to solve two problem:(1) TEC's implications and dimension; (2) the effect of the TEC on TED.In study 1, the construct of Team Entrepreneurial Cognition was developed. This study used in-depth interview method to interview 10 entrepreneurial teams. Content analysis was conducted for coding the interview materials. And then the construct of TEC was verified by means of empirical method. The original questionnaire was developed by referring both from previous research and the results of in-depth interview. On the stage of scale refinement, exploratory factor analysis was conducted in a sample of 93 individuals.In study 2, the relationships among TEC, TOR, ETE, TED were examined. The sample of 156 entrepreneurial teams was employed to conduct a quantitative analysis. The original questionnaire was developed by referring both from study 1 and previous research. Statistical software like SPSS and AMOS were used to do reliability analysis, validity analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis.Three important results of this study:TEC is a multi-dimensional construct .which included Shared Task Understanding (including Entrepreneurial Commitment, Team Consensus and Task Understanding) and Awareness of Expertise Location (including Expertise Awareness, Retrieval Coordination and Mutual Trust); Shared task understanding, as well as awareness of expertise location has a positive impact on the feasibility and desirability recognition of opportunity recognition, which can significantly promote the team entrepreneurial decision; Entrepreneurial team-efficacy moderates the relationship between entrepreneurial opportunity recognition and entrepreneurial decision.