Based on the goal-setting perspective, and by constructing a chain mediation model in which entrepreneur Darwinian identity affects new venture performance via wealth attitudes and team contractual governance, this paper explores the internal mechanism of the impact of entrepreneur Darwinian identity on new venture performance.

The conclusions are as follows: First, entrepreneur Darwinian identity has a direct contribution to firm performance. Second, the reference framework of Darwinian identity for competition goals enhances entrepreneurs’ obsession with wealth and their view of wealth as achievement and strength, which damages firm performance. Third, Darwinian identity is committed to defining contractual governance and improving firm performance in order to achieve goals more efficiently. Fourth, Darwinian identity enables entrepreneurs to improve their wealth attitudes by binding personal success with wealth, which squeezes the space for team members to adjust their human capital incentives, leading to a decline in contractual governance, making it difficult for the team to operate normally, and ultimately damaging firm performance.

Based on the above findings, the following insights are obtained: First, by recognizing the impact of entrepreneur Darwinian identity on team entrepreneurship, they can break through the formal entrepreneurial groups and give play to the real advantages of team entrepreneurship. Second, when improving the contractual governance of entrepreneurial teams, Darwinian identity entrepreneurs should also pay attention to the problem of decreasing incentive effect due to the over emphasis on wealth attitudes, so as to avoid the dilemma of entrepreneurial team management. Third, the findings can also be used as an important basis for investors to examine teams.

Future directions include that: Further expand the scope of the survey sample to enhance the generalizability of the results; clarify the causal relationship between entrepreneur Darwinian identity and entrepreneurial team governance and new venture performance through the contextual experimental research; explore the issues of entrepreneur identity and team governance from the perspective of shared leadership, excluding the bias of individual team members and overcoming the difficulty of sampling caused by the specificity of entrepreneurial teams.

The main contributions of this paper are that: It expands the boundary of entrepreneur Darwinian identity research by introducing team entrepreneurship as an important context into the research. From the perspective of social identity, it opens up the “black box” of the impact of Darwinian identity on firm performance, and reveals that although Darwinian identity has clear goals that help to improve performance, the contractual governance problems caused by wealth attitudes in the team context may hinder the growth of new ventures, which enriches the research on the antecedent variables of entrepreneurial team governance and new venture performance. It breaks through the limitation of single role and helps to clarify the multiple roles of entrepreneur Darwinian identity on new venture performance, beyond the limitations of a single role.