Research on work stress has shifted from a purely individual lens toward shared stress climates in teams (Kozusznik et al., 2015). Yet most studies still analyse stress as an individual state (Liu & Liu, 2018), pay little attention to anticipatory appraisals before work begins (Hyun et al., 2019), and almost never track whether within-team agreement strengthens or reduces over time (Fyhn et al., 2023). This matters because both mean stress levels and the pattern of within-team dispersion shape coordination and performance (Bosak et al., 2017). We address this gap by comparing two forms of appraisal in entrepreneurial top-management teams: anticipatory stress, a forward-looking evaluation of upcoming demands, and experienced stress, in-the-moment strain as demands unfold (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Guided by transactional stress appraisal, climate-emergence models, and temporal social appraisal perspectives, we ask whether, over a two-week work episode, team members converge (consensus) or instead diverge (dissensus) in their stress appraisals, and whether these trajectories differ for anticipatory stress versus experienced stress. We collected intensive longitudinal data from 121 entrepreneurs nested in 40 top management teams in early-stage ventures. For 14 consecutive workdays, participants reported (a) how stressful they expected the upcoming workday to be and (b) how stressed they felt during the workday. We modelled daily change in within-team dispersion for each construct using a three-level consensus-emergence approach, which treats decreasing dispersion as convergence toward a shared climate and increasing dispersion as divergence. Across 14 days, anticipatory stress displayed consensus divergence, with within-team dispersion increasing. Experienced stress showed no overall emergence, but older teams diverged more, indicating that team age accelerates dispersion in experienced stress. These results suggest that "stress climate" is not automatically shared. Distinguishing anticipatory and experienced stress is therefore essential: they are not interchangeable signs of "team stress", and they do not evolve identically.