“Don’t leave me this way!” Drivers of parental hostility and employee spin-offs’ performance
研究员工衍生企业为何会遭遇原雇主的敌意，发现推出替代产品、挖角员工等初始战略会引发敌意，但敌意反而提升了衍生企业的创新和经济绩效。
Abstract Many entrepreneurs commercialize an idea they initially developed as employees of an incumbent firm. While some face retaliatory reactions from their (former) employer, others are left alone or even supported. It is not clear, however, why some employee spin-offs face parental hostility while others do not, and to what extent this parental hostility affects employee spin-offs’ performance. Integrating the resource-based view with insights on competition and retaliation, we propose that parental hostility increases with the (perceived) competitive threat posed by an employee spin-off. Specifically, we advance employee spin-offs’ initial strategic actions (offering substitute products, hiring employees of the parent, and attempting to first develop the idea inside the parent) as key drivers of parental hostility and consequent spin-off performance. Results from a pooled dataset of 1083 employee spin-offs in Germany confirm that these initial strategic actions trigger parental hostility, which in turn, and contrary to expectations, positively affects employee spin-offs’ innovation and economic performance. These results advance the literature on employee spin-offs in several ways and have important practical implications.