<span>Investors of venture backed firms, seeking to increase knowledge diversity, cognitive conflict, professionalism and charisma within their top management teams (TMTs), tend to accelerate the turnover of executives within these teams, often resulting in multiple cohorts of tenure. Paradoxically, this search for increased professionalism and beneficial cognitive conflict results in heightened affective (or role based) conflict. Past studies have identified an inverse relationship between charisma and affective conflict, on one hand, and a positive relationship between tenure diversity and affective </span><span>conflict, on the other hand. This study is the first to integrate these two relationships while simultaneously seeking to identify whether identity group formation mediates the direct effects of charisma and tenure diversity on the level of conflict across the spectrum of both high and low performing firms. We find that tenure identity group participation and TMT team identity group participation indeed mediate the effect of CEO charisma on conflict. We also find TMT identity group affiliation mediates the positive effect of tenure diversity on conflict in low performing teams.Doctorate of Management Programs</span>
