Faultline configurations affecting the entrepreneurial team performance of new generation of returning migrant workers in China: An empirical study based on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis

Abstract

As the impact of faultlines is still without a consensus, to figure out how faultlines will hurt or promote the entrepreneurial performance can help the new generation of Chinese migrant workers to start their businesses successfully under the Rural Revitalization Strategy. This study addressed a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) based on 32 returning entrepreneurial teams from a complexity perspective. We firstly introduced three faultline categories for migrant workers and selected five of the faultlines with high factor loads in each category for further analysis. Then a scale was developed to measure the team performance. By conducting fsQCA, four types of faultline configurations were found: (1) background-experience actuation; (2) guidance-balance lacking; (3) role-cognition conflict; and (4) information-decision polarization. The “background-experience actuation” type will promote the entrepreneurial performance while the other types will hurt the performance. Theoretically, breaking through the limitations of traditional regressions in previous studies, fsQCA is used to explore the complex interactions and integrated effects among different categories of faultlines, demonstrates that the unstable impact is just a one-sided representation of the overall effect, and fills the general faultline theory with Chinese specific scenario and small-sized entrepreneurship. Practically, several implications are proposed to optimize the heterogeneity of the returning migrant workers’ entrepreneurial teams and increase their performances, such as constructing the “balance” and “guidance” mechanism, enriching the background diversity of the members and solving the information-decision faultlines into individual diversity, etc., which can also be utilized by migrant worker entrepreneurs in other developing areas in the world.