 Entrepreneurial leadership, strategic flexibility, and venture performance: Does founders' span of control matter?Simon Hensellek, Lucas Kleine-Stegemann and Tobias Kollmann Journal of Business Research, 2023, vol. 157, issue C Abstract: While research provides consistent evidence on the relationship between leadership and firm performance, little is known about the mechanisms and organizational context through which founders’ entrepreneurial leadership behaviors affect venture performance. Building on and extending the upper echelons theory, our study uses data on 507 entrepreneurial ventures and finds that strategic flexibility is an important strategic capability that positively mediates the link between entrepreneurial leadership and venture performance. We introduce span of control—measured by the number of employees per founder—as an important structural variable that moderates these relationships. Notably, strategic flexibility fully mediates the leadership–performance relationship only at low to moderate levels of span of control, and not at high numbers of employees per founder. Finally, we discuss the study’s implications in the light of upper echelons theory and how they can guide founders’ leadership behavior in practice. Keywords: Entrepreneurial leadership; Strategic flexibility; Venture performance; Span of control; Upper echelons theory (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:157:y:2023:i:c:s0148296322010098 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.113544 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier |
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