Understanding and Measuring Entrepreneurial Leadership Style

Although entrepreneurial leadership is embraced in the popular press and in classrooms, academic knowledge remains underdeveloped. We develop the construct of entrepreneurial leadership and argue that it involves influencing and directing the performance of group members toward achieving those organizational goals that involve recognizing and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities. We discuss environmental, organizational, and follower‐specific contingencies that may influence the success of entrepreneurial leadership, and we test the reliability and validity of an empirical measure for this construct (the ENTRELEAD scale). Using this novel measurement tool, we find that entrepreneurial leadership is more prevalent among founder‐leaders than nonfounder leaders, which indicates construct validity.     

Entrepreneurial passion diversity in new venture teams: An empirical examination of short- and long-term performance implications

Empirical evidence is mounting that passion is an important part of entrepreneurship, contributing to behavior and outcomes for entrepreneurs, employees, and ventures. Yet knowledge of the performance implications of passion within new venture teams is sorely lacking. We examine how both the average level of entrepreneurial passion and the diversity of passion within new venture teams contributes to venture performance in both the short- and long-term. We test our model with multi-source, multi-wave data collected from 107 new venture teams participating in an accelerator program. Our findings indicate that average team passion is not significantly related to performance, but passion diversity, particularly intensity separation, is negatively related to performance. These findings have important implications for the literature on passion, new venture teams, and group affective diversity.Executive summaryWhile existing studies have substantially improved our understanding of entrepreneurial passion, its sources, and its subsequent impact, insight into this topic remains limited in at least three ways. First, most new ventures are founded and led by teams rather than individuals, yet existing studies predominantly focus on entrepreneurial passion at the individual rather than team level. Second, while there is a prevailing assumption in existing literature that entrepreneurial passion leads to beneficial outcomes consistent with longstanding work in psychology, there is emerging evidence in entrepreneurship that passion may not always be functional and that it can even be dysfunctional. Despite this, we have limited understanding of what types of passion or when or for whom it is dysfunctional. And third, extant work on entrepreneurial passion for individuals and within teams has focused on behavioral or self-report measures of performance (e.g. Cardon and Kirk, 2015; Santos & Cardon, 2019) as well as venture survival, rather than objective team or firm performance in the short- and long-term.In this paper, we study the influence of team passion on new venture team performance. We draw on theory concerning entrepreneurial passion within venture teams (Cardon et al., 2017) that suggests that different aspects of entrepreneurial passion within teams shape team dynamics and venture outcomes. While generally, theories of passion suggest that entrepreneurial passion is positively related to team outcomes due to the positive emotions it brings about, we find that in teams, the relationships are more complex. While the average level of passion among team members is positively related to team performance when considered alone, this effect is not significant when passion diversity is also considered. Diversity of passion among individual team members has a negative relationship with team performance, including diversity in the level of passion team members experience (intensity separation), as well as diversity in the object of their passion (focus variety). These negatively affect team dynamics due to conflicting emotions and identities among team members associated with passion diversity. We examine these relationships on specific team performance outcomes including evaluation of the business idea in the short-term and venture performance five years after their participation in an accelerator.The sample used in this study includes 107 entrepreneurial teams that were part of an accelerator program in the Netherlands. Teams were evaluated on the quality of their business ideas at the end of the accelerator program and the amount of investment the team had received five years later. Our results provide no support for positive effects of average team passion on the quality of the business ideas and confirm the negative effects of passion intensity separation on the quality of the business idea and the negative effects of passion focus variety on later venture performance.This paper makes several contributions. First, we expand the literature on passion in entrepreneurship, specifically adding to our understanding of passion within new venture teams. More specifically, we contribute to the growing body of evidence concerning potential dysfunctions of passion by uncovering a dysfunctional property of team passion diversity that uniquely manifests itself at the team level of analysis. We contribute to the literature on new venture teams by examining team composition in the form of passion diversity, and its relationship with team performance. Finally, our study extends work on the effects of entrepreneurial passion by looking at objective team performance outcomes in both the short- and long-term.For entrepreneurs, our findings confirm the importance of affect and identity for new venture teams, and specifically our findings indicate that there is a dark side to team passion. While passion is generally positioned as a positive phenomenon, we highlight the negative outcomes that passion can have in the team context. Diversity in the amount of passion team members experience can diminish the quality of the business ideas the team is able to generate in the short-term, while diversity in the focus of team members' passion can diminish the firm's long-term performance. For investors and accelerator communities this research validates the importance of considering entrepreneurial team composition and specifically entrepreneurial passion levels and domains when investing in teams or when supporting venture building.     

Effects of transactional leadership,psychological empowerment and empowerment climate on creative performance of subordinates: A cross-level study

This research surveyed 101 teams, involving 497 team members and 101 team leaders, in a large multinational company in China. A hierarchical linear model is used to examine the hypothesized mediated moderation model. It is found that: (1) individual psychological empowerment is positively related to creative performance; (2) the relationship between transactional leadership and subordinates’ creative performance is moderated by team empowerment climate; (3) individual transactional leadership behavior is positively related to subordinates’ creative performance in teams with higher empowerment climate, but negatively related to subordinates’ creative performance in lower empowerment climate; and (4) the relationship between transactional leadership, team empowerment climate and creative performance is partially mediated by subordinates’ psychological empowerment perception. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are also discussed.     

Entrepreneurial visions in founding teams: Conceptualization,emergence, and effects on opportunity development

Prior research on entrepreneurial visions has typically taken a leadership perspective and explored how the founders’ future images of their ventures motivate themselves and followers. Drawing on an upper echelon perspective and longitudinal case studies of eight founding teams, this study finds that founders’ entrepreneurial visions do not only capture the future images of their ventures, but also the future images of the founders’ relationship with it. Taking into account this personal aspect of visions, we show that within a founding team, the members’ visions can be incongruent, i.e., they cannot be realized simultaneously within the current venture. While our data reveal that vision incongruence tends to occurs when all team members perceive to have an equal status, vision congruence emerges when the attributed status in the team is heterogeneous. Founding teams with more congruent visions tend to follow a focused opportunity development path, while those with less congruent visions tend to follow a comprehensive opportunity development path. Depending on the teams’ behaviors in the face of challenging situations either path can lead to successful opportunity commercialization or failure. We discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on entrepreneurial visions, opportunities, and upper echelons.     

Entrepreneurial leadership and MNE subsidiary performance: The moderating role of subsidiary context

Managers of international subsidiaries, especially subsidiary CEOs, operate at critical interfaces within multinational enterprises (MNEs) and hold strategic responsibility for the operations in their country. Yet, their impact on subsidiary performance has received scant research attention. Building on the subsidiary entrepreneurship and strategic leadership literatures, we develop a model of how subsidiary CEOs’ entrepreneurial leadership affects subsidiary performance, and how this relationship is moderated by the subsidiary context that determines managerial discretion. We combine survey data of 291 international subsidiaries in South Korea with archival data to test our hypotheses. Our results show that subsidiary CEOs’ entrepreneurial leadership enhances subsidiary performance and that this relationship is strengthened by managerial discretion. Our study highlights the pivotal role of subsidiary CEOs within MNEs and contributes to a microfoundational understanding of international subsidiary management.     

Entrepreneurial personalities in political leadership

Societies around the globe respond to the contemporary technological and economic change by defining entrepreneurship and innovation as core principles for future competitive advantage. Does this rise of the “entrepreneurial society” also imply that entrepreneurial personalities are becoming increasingly widespread and powerful in political leadership? Joseph A. Schumpeter already argued that highly influential entrepreneurs are unique and show a certain personality pattern that can be described as being not only high in creativity and change orientation but also high in competitiveness and rule-breaking. It is interesting to ask whether such Schumpeterian personalities indeed play an increasingly important role in political leadership, given that daily routines of policy leaders, at least at first glance, usually require rather non-entrepreneurial strategies such as careful, risk-averse diplomacy. To address this question, we first survey the existing literature on personality and political leadership. We further present a novel personality analysis of an influential business leader that recently made a transition to political leadership: Donald J. Trump, the incumbent US president. Employing a language-based, computerized method of analyzing Twitter statements, we compare his online personality to the online personality of other influential entrepreneurs and business managers, who do not engage in political leadership. The results indicate that Trump is indeed distinct in that he shows stronger features of a Schumpeterian personality. However, he is also comparatively high in Neuroticism. We discuss these findings focusing on the potential implications of a concentration of entrepreneurial mindsets in political leadership.     

家长式领导风格与高管团队行为整合的关系

家长式领导是一种具有较强的纪律性和权威性,并伴有慈父般的仁爱以及崇高的道德品行的领导方式,它包含权威、仁慈、德行三个维度,且各个维度对高层管理团队行为整合的效用有所不同.权威领导强调的是严厉的控制和教诲,仁慈领导强调的是对员工工作和生活需要的关注,德行领导强调的是领导者个人的品行和美德.首席执行官权威领导风格对企业高层管理团队行为整合具有显著的负向影响,仁慈领导风格和德行领导风格则具有显著的正向影响.     

Upper echelons and portfolio strategies of venture capital firms

In this study we analyze how the composition of the top management team (TMT) influences the portfolio strategy choice in venture capital (VC) organizations. We develop a model of risk perception to investigate how education and experience of TMT members impact whether VC organizations invest with a focus on early stage ventures or not, specialize or diversify across industries, and invest with a broad or narrow geographic scope.Evaluation of data on TMTs and portfolio strategies of 136 European VC firms revealed that VC firms with higher proportions of TMT members with science/engineering education and entrepreneurial experience more likely invest with an early stage focus. Furthermore, TMTs with more management education diversify their portfolios more across industries. Finally, the more international experience TMT members of VC organizations have, the broader the geographic scope of investees. We discuss the implications of our findings for the VC literature.     

Early teams: The impact of team demography on VC financing and going public

This study investigates how top management team (TMT) demographic characteristics affect firm outcomes for young high technology firms in Silicon Valley. We study how team composition and turnover shape an entrepreneurial firm's ability to attract venture capital and its ability to successfully complete an initial public offering. We find that broad access to information by virtue of having top management team members that have worked for many different employers (diverse prior company affiliations) and have diverse prior experiences (functional diversity) tend to be associated with positive outcomes. In addition, entrants to and founder exits from the TMT increase the likelihood that a firm achieves an IPO. TMT exits, in turn, reduce the likelihood of achieving an IPO. Results also suggest that prior human capital experience is consistently associated with positive firm outcomes. These findings suggest that team experiences, composition and turnover are all important for bringing new insights to the firm and are associated with the likelihood that an entrepreneurial firm will succeed.     

创业创始人团队成员变动研究评介

创业创始人团队(EFT)相比单一创业者,可以为新生企业带来多样性的资源,成为新生企业生存和发展的重要基础。随着新生企业的发展,EFT成员变动成为一个普遍的现象,包括成员退出和成员进入。创业者只有正确理解和把握EFT在企业成长过程中的这种动态变化性,才能更好地应对EFT随着企业发展可能出现的不平衡问题,使EFT为新生企业的持续成长提供适应企业发展阶段的适当管理模式和资源支持。     

Entrepreneurial Orientation and Corruption

Organizational corruption is a wide-spread negative aspect of economic activity, and a seemingly never-ending series of corruption scandals has been made public around the globe. Although research is performed in a broad variety of disciplines, ranging from psychology to management to law, a fully satisfactory explanation for the causes of organizational corruption has not been found. By looking at organizational factors as potential triggers for corruptive behavior, this study draws upon the concept of entrepreneurial orientation (EO). Diverse studies have shown that EO, as an antecedent to company performance, has a positive effect. Recent EO literature, however, indicates that EO has not only positive but also negative consequences. In this line of reasoning, this study builds upon principal agent theory and makes a first step in exploring the impact of EO on a negative aspect of business behavior, namely organizational corruption. We gathered survey data and publicly available data from 411 firms, inquiring for both acts of corruption from within the top management team over the last 3 years and the level of entrepreneurial orientation within the organization. Results show diverging effects along the individual dimensions of EO; they point to risk orientation as the dark side of EO, as it significantly increases the likelihood of corrupt behavior in companies. In contrast, innovation orientation, to a certain extent, counterbalances by reducing the likelihood of corrupt behavior.     

Advancing Entrepreneurial Leadership as a Practice in MSME Management and Development

Consistent with recent studies, we emphasize that entrepreneurial leadership benefits from mutual cross‐fertilization between entrepreneurship and leadership, making it an effective mechanism for studying micro small and medium enterprise (MSME) management and development. Since it is an emerging concept and existing knowledge on MSME management and development so scattered, our comprehensive entrepreneurship and leadership literature review provided us in‐depth insights and new perspectives. From our analysis, a framework emerged mapping a new path for MSMEs. The model presents a nuanced leadership paradigm for small businesses. Thus, by presenting a mechanism that offers new methods aimed at managing and developing MSMEs, we extend existing leadership theories.     

Initial Public Offering Investor Valuations: An Examination of Top Management Team Prestige and Environmental Uncertainty

Relying on one of the more notable entrepreneurial settings, an initial public offering (IPO), this article extends prior work on top management team (TMT) characteristics. We examine whether or not prestigious TMTs at the time of an IPO enhance organizational legitimacy and thereby provide a signal to potential investors. Because an IPO represents an entrepreneurial context characterized by high levels of uncertainty, we also consider the impact of environmental uncertainty on the TMT prestige/investor valuation relationship. We find that both an element of TMT prestige and environmental uncertainty influence investor valuations. However, we also find that the influence of prestige does not assuage investors when analyzing IPOs in different environmental conditions.     

Talking Your Way into Entrepreneurial Support: An Analysis of Satisfaction Drivers in Entrepreneur Mutual Aid Groups

The role of organized peer networks in entrepreneurial support systems has been surprisingly neglected in the literature, despite their undisputed effectiveness in numerous areas outside the entrepreneurship realm. This study explores the efficacy of mutual aid groups for entrepreneurial support, as theoretically distinct from other group‐based mechanisms (such as peer group mentoring and many to one group mentoring). Drawing from respondent data of small, local mutual aid groups within the global entrepreneurship support organization (2,869 responses from members of 540 groups worldwide), we investigate the factors determining the entrepreneurs' satisfaction with the entrepreneur mutual aid groups. Understanding the antecedents of members' subjective satisfaction with the group serves an essential first step toward developing the models explaining the objective effectiveness of these organizations (e.g., performance, survival, and growth), in that the former is an essential, necessary condition for continuing participation in the voluntary mutual aid groups. Our analysis reveals that group climate and leadership are important drivers of group satisfaction.     

Integrating Pragmatism and Ethics in Entrepreneurial Leadership for Sustainable Value Creation

The relationship between entrepreneurship and ethics has largely been characterized as antithetical. In this article we develop a conceptual model integrating pragmatism, a philosophical approach that emphasizes experimentation and action characteristic of entrepreneurial leadership, with ethics to suggest that the two are not incompatible and that sustaining entrepreneurial leadership for value creation necessitates ethical action to build legitimacy. Case studies from the United States and India highlight the necessity of infusing pragmatism with ethics for sustainable entrepreneurial leadership.     

论企业高管团队的利器--团队领导力--以复星集团的五人团队为例

本文首先基于领导理论发展主线的成果提出团队领导力的概念，指出其理应成为现代管理团队发展的一项核心能力；认为团队领导力体现于团队角色和经理角色的交叉域，每种团队角色都对应一种或几种经理角色，具有不同特色的领导职能，它们相互紧密啮合、缺一不可，都是团队领导力不可分割的部分。文章并以复星集团的五人团队为例，分析了其特点和对团队领导力的成功运用。     

监督机制、企业家创业能力与绩效关系研究

基于制度理论和动态能力观点,建立了一个分析监督机制、企业家创业能力与绩效关系的理论框架,并提出了3条假设。基于195家企业样本的实证分析表明：董事长与总经理两职分离与企业家创业能力发挥正相关,股权集中度与企业家创业能力发挥负相关;企业家创业能力发挥有助于提升企业绩效。     

Gender-based Barriers to Senior Management Positions: Understanding the Scarcity of Female CEOs

Although the number of women in middle management has grown quite rapidly in the last two decades, the number of female CEOs in large corporations remains extremely low. This article examines many explanations for why women have not risen to the top, including lack of line experience, inadequate career opportunities, gender differences in linguistic styles and socialization, gender-based stereotypes, the old boy network at the top, and tokenism. Alternative explanations are also presented and analyzed, such as differences between female leadership styles and the type of leadership style expected at the top of organizations, feminist explanations for the underrepresentation of women in top management positions, and the possibility that the most talented women in business often avoid corporate life in favor of entrepreneurial careers.     

Examining the Link between Entrepreneurial Orientation and Learning Processes in Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises

The present study unravels how small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) learn and determines the role that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays in how they learn. Adopting a multilevel perspective on learning and the unique role of the management team in SMEs, the study empirically examines the “feed‐forward” learning process initiated by the intuition and interpretation of individual managers, advanced by integration on the management team level, and brought to the organizational level by institutionalization. It also identifies firm‐level EO as an antecedent to this process on all three organizational levels, highlighting the relevance of innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk‐taking with respect to learning in SMEs.     

创业团队企业家精神及其测量

创业团队企业家精神的本质特征概括为集体创新、分享认知、共担风险和协作进取.在相关文献回顾基础上,借鉴个体企业家精神和公司企业家精神的测度量表,开发设计了创业团队企业家精神的测度量表,并通过调查数据分析,对量表的信度和效度进行实证检验,为今后拓宽并深化企业家精神的研究奠定了基础.