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Several contributions from organizational, strategy and entrepreneurship research emphasize the cofounder relationship as a promising concept to explain the success of growing companies and acknowledge its peculiarities in contrast to conventional group or team behavior. Despite the recognized relevance of the cofounder relationship for organizational success, there has not been any systematic attempt to examine how a cofounder relationship develops in the course of venture creation and growth, even though most start-up teams split up in their first years of founding. As a result, key questions about the origins, evolution and stabilization of the cofounder relationship remain unresolved and a profound understanding of what dynamics of a relationship affect relationship maintenance and business innovation is missing.
Drawing on insights from two different research disciplines, couple research and management research, I place the cofounder relationship as a central theoretical concept in the foreground of my research, especially the development of the quality of interaction among the members of a team from the perspective of the founders' subjective expectations of the relationship itself as well as the joint start-up project in order to find out how the founder's relationship and capabilities develop and stabilize over time. To examine these questions, I focus on the most prominent form of cofounder teams, i.e. dyadic team constellations, and draw on the findings of six case studies from a qualitative-exploratory and procedural analysis design to shed light on the phenomenon under study. Based on the theoretical and empirical investigations, this work shows that (1) the cofounder relationship may be better understood by examining the founders’ individual expectations of autonomy and connection in their relationship (relationship expectation) as well as their expectations on the development and growth of their organizations (business expectation) over time, (2) relationship expectations in early stages of business creation are proximity-oriented, whereas cofounders place greater emphasis on autonomy in later stages of development and, ultimately, on achieving a balance of closeness and distance, (3) business expectations in early start-up phases are generally illusory and cofounders focus on converging and overly optimistic goals, whereas over time, individual business expectations are weighted more and the tolerance to accept expectations discrepancies decreases, (4) adapting and synchronizing diverging goal expectations and entrepreneurial actions becomes a critical skill for stable teams, (5) relationship expectations and growth expectations co-evolve in a dynamic way and cofounder relationships embrace contradictory needs that are constantly present and striving for balance, (6) relationship stability can only be achieved by maintaining relationships through an ongoing dialectical flux and by reaching a dynamic equilibrium in relationship definition and satisfaction levels of individuals. Overall, the findings of this dissertation offer contributions to better understanding the complex and multi-dimensional nature of the cofounder relationship as well as the development of internal relationship structures and provide a number of implications for further empirical research.