Beyond cultural values? Cultural leadership ideals and entrepreneurship

Abstract

This paper offers a fresh perspective on national culture and entrepreneurship research. It explores the role of Culturally-endorsed implicit Leadership Theories (CLTs) – i.e., the cultural expectations about outstanding, ideal leadership – on individual entrepreneurship. Developing arguments based on culture-entrepreneurship fit, we predict that charismatic and self-protective CLTs positively affect entrepreneurship. They provide a context that enables entrepreneurs to be co-operative in order to initiate change but also to be self-protective and competitive so as to safeguard their venture and avoid being exploited. We further theorize that CLTs are more proximal drivers of cross-country differences in entrepreneurship as compared with distal cultural values. We find support for our propositions in a multi-level study of 42 countries. Cultural values (of uncertainty avoidance and collectivism) influence entrepreneurship mainly indirectly, via charismatic and self-protective CLTs. We do not find a similar indirect effect for cultural practices.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2016.07.003
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Economics, Finance & Entrepreneurship
Additional Information: © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Uncontrolled Keywords: entrepreneurial behaviour,entrepreneurship,culture,leadership,individualism,institutions,values,practices,Business and International Management,Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management,Applied Psychology
Publication ISSN: 1873-2003
Last Modified: 14 Oct 2024 07:24
Date Deposited: 03 Aug 2016 09:20
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2016-09
Published Online Date: 2016-07-17
Accepted Date: 2016-07-09
Submitted Date: 2014-11-24
Authors: Stephan, Ute (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-4514-6057)
Pathak, Saurav

Export / Share Citation


Statistics

Additional statistics for this record