Dynamics of corporate entrepreneurship team responses to the autonomy–control paradox

Corporate entrepreneurship often requires that internal teams working on entrepreneurial
projects receive the autonomy needed for recognizing and exploiting new business opportunities.
At the same time, corporate organizations need to control these entrepreneurial teams by
standardizing processes to facilitate coordination and leveraging synergies across projects. These
opposing demands give rise to the prevalent autonomy-control paradox in corporate
entrepreneurial teams. Drawing on a qualitative, longitudinal study of eight teams working on
entrepreneurial projects within the same corporate organization, I explore how team members
perceive and respond to the autonomy–control paradox. In the period of five months, I collected
202 interviews, and enriched these with observational and archival data. From my analysis, I
identify that corporate entrepreneurial teams differ in their attention to autonomy and control
which initiates divergence, competition, and negotiation processes within the teams. These
different processes determine how teams cope with the autonomy–control paradox, that is, while
some teams align their efforts and manage to accommodate the competing demands, others
experience effort fragmentation, team disintegration and engage in faked accommodation of the
demands. My inductive model offers contributions to the literature on corporate
entrepreneurship.