Abstract
New ventures rely on diverse stakeholders to access critical resources, knowledge, and legitimacy. However, as relationships evolve, misaligned goals, shifting priorities, and uncertainty about future value of the relationship often generate tensions that can strain collaborations. In this study, we explore how entrepreneurs navigate such tensions and why similar tensions can lead to different disengagement outcomes. Drawing on qualita-tive data from 106 stakeholder relationships across eight university spin-offs, we induc-tively develop a framework illustrating how tensions trigger relational work. Our findings reveal that not all tensions result in relationship dissolution. Entrepreneurs often seek to reposition strong stakeholder ties by redefining the collaboration rather than terminating it. In contrast, weak ties particularly those characterized by interpersonal or process ten-sions are more likely to be dissolved. This study advances research on entrepreneurial network by shifting attention from tie formation to tie management and dissolvement. We show that network evolution is not merely additive but involves deliberate tie recon-figuration as entrepreneurs address tensions in ongoing stakeholder relationships. By dif-ferentiating types of tensions and corresponding relational work by entrepreneurs, we un-cover the micro-level mechanisms at relationship level that drive network evolution in entrepreneurial contexts.