Corporate entrepreneurship often requires that internal teams working on entrepreneurial projects receive the autonomy needed for recognizing and exploiting new business opportunities. At the same time, corporate organizations need to control these entrepreneurial teams by standardizing processes to facilitate coordination and leveraging synergies across projects. These opposing demands give rise to the prevalent autonomy-control paradox in corporate entrepreneurial teams. Drawing on a qualitative, longitudinal study of eight teams working on entrepreneurial projects within the same corporate organization, I explore how team members perceive and respond to the autonomy–control paradox. In the period of five months, I collected 202 interviews, and enriched these with observational and archival data. From my analysis, I identify that corporate entrepreneurial teams differ in their attention to autonomy and control which initiates divergence, competition, and negotiation processes within the teams. These different processes determine how teams cope with the autonomy–control paradox, that is, while some teams align their efforts and manage to accommodate the competing demands, others experience effort fragmentation, team disintegration and engage in faked accommodation of the demands. My inductive model offers contributions to the literature on corporate entrepreneurship.weiterlesen