Founding teams often experience the exit of co-founders. To develop theory about how founding teams deal with adversity emerging from the exit of one of their members, we take a team-resilience perspective and study the development of six founding teams. Our inductive model highlights how founding teams take different trajectories following team member exits, leading to different types of psychological closure, which impact the teams' resilience building. Our model also suggests how teams not engaging in distancing from the exit-related adversity experience additional adversity within the continuing team, eventually leading to team failure. Our findings challenge and extend extant studies on exits in founding teams and team resilience.

创始团队经常会遇到联合创始人退出的情况。为了发展关于创始团队如何应对因一名成员退出而出现的逆境的理论，我们从团队复原力的角度研究了六个创始团队的发展。我们的归纳模型强调了创始团队如何在团队成员退出后采取不同的轨迹，导致不同类型的心理封闭，从而影响团队的弹性建设。我们的模型还表明，不远离与退出相关的逆境的团队如何在持续的团队中经历额外的逆境，最终导致团队失败。我们的研究结果挑战并扩展了有关创始团队退出和团队复原力的现有研究。