Building a scalable workforce in entrepreneurial firms: practices and activities for reconciling the change-stability paradox

Abstract

Digital entrepreneurial firms, from SaaS startups to global platforms, face a central paradox: building a workforce that scales as fast as their technologies. Software and other intangible, replicable assets enable market expansion, yet internal human capacity lags, creating tensions between change and stability. This thesis examines how such firms construct a “scalable workforce”: the capability to reconfigure talent rapidly without eroding coherence, culture, or strategic focus. Situated in Spain’s maturing startup ecosystem, home to nearly 1,000 scale-ups, $19 billion in funding, and the 2022 Startups Law, the study offers a rich view of the human side of scaling, including onboarding, culture codification and preserving agility. Empirically, it draws on 39 qualitative interviews with founders, executives, venture capitalists, and scaling experts, triangulated with archival sources. The sample includes digital ventures founded since 2011 and showing rapid growth. An inductive design, grounded in the Gioia methodology, enabled insight through iterative coding. Findings identify three paradoxes underpinning workforce scalability: agility–cohesion, exploration–focus, and autonomy–discipline. High-growth firms do not resolve these tensions via simple trade-offs; they reconcile them through portfolios of mutually reinforcing human practices. The thesis theorises three mechanisms that enable reconciliation. Harmonising addresses agility–cohesion through social bonding, collaborative hiring and shared rituals. Anchoring navigates exploration–focus by embedding expert mentorship, lightweight governance, and structured experimentation. Entrusting balances autonomy–discipline by setting clear boundaries that encourage initiative while ensuring reliability. The research extends paradox theory into the underexplored domain of workforce scalability and bridges scaling scholarship with human resource challenges. It offers an integrated framework explaining how digital ventures manage tensions through practice rather than attempting to eliminate them. For scholars, the work refines the activities of scaling; for practitioners, it provides guidance on orchestrating people systems that grow as fast as code. Ultimately, the thesis
argues that embracing paradox is a strategic imperative for scaling.

Date of Award	Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	Northern Ireland Department for the Economy
Supervisor	Kieran Conroy (Supervisor) & Hilary Downey (Supervisor)