Entrepreneurial Leadership: Approaches To Entrepreneurial Leadership

Approaches to Entrepreneurial Leadership

There are various approaches to entrepreneurial leadership, which are different from each other depending on the subtopic of the studies, as Roomi and Harrison (2011) remark, “the literature on entrepreneurial leadership is diffused, probably because of the definitional challenge of the construct itself” (p. 4). However, they categorize the approaches into four types of studies, which: 1) explore the combination of entrepreneurship and leadership, 2) embrace psychological aspects, 3) highlight the scope in which the leadership is needed, and 4) try to analyze the whole concept without actually specify it.

The first type of approach is well represented by Perren (2002), who indicates that the available studies of entrepreneurship and leadership exhibit corresponding notions with overlapping conceptual

First, they listed out three roles that entrepreneurial leaders commonly undertake, which are ‘absorbing uncertainty’, ‘framing the challenge’, and ‘path clearing’. Then, they used data from the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project to establish the validity of the concept of entrepreneurial leadership by determining the characteristics of leadership related with the three roles. This study shows the validity of the general and ‘etic’ characteristics of the entrepreneurial leadership concept. Moreover, this study also points out that although the effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership is accepted by most organizations and societies, there are still some different perceptions. For example, cultures with higher degree of equality such as Anglo and Nordic societies, have more potential to accept entrepreneurial leadership than cultures with higher degree of authority, such as Middle Eastern and Confucian Societies (Gupta, MacMillan, & Gita,