Entrepreneurial leadership: Approaches to definition and main research directions

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of the main studies on entrepreneurial leadership, which is aimed at identifying the features of concept development, generalization and systematization of knowledge in this area. The analysis was based on publications in the leading international research journals during the period from 1994 to 2018. It results in the development of the main approaches to defining the entrepreneurial leadership, which made it possible to trace the evolution of the concept development, and presentation of the research directions and their results. The entrepreneurial leadership concept, which emerged at the intersection of leadership and entrepreneurship theoretical perspectives, has now prompted far from its initial stage of development, which began in the 1980s, but it still hasn’t reached its final theoretical configuration. A combination of disparate theoretical and methodological approaches in active development of empirical research on this topic results in two problems: a difficulty in understanding the entrepreneurial leadership in various contexts and ambiguous results. The revealed characteristics of the current stage of the concept development allowed us to give general recommendations regarding its further development in terms of integrity as well as to identify relevant topics for research. The importance of including the entrepreneurial leadership concept in the field of scientific knowledge is explained by the fact that it will integrate the theoretical knowledge related to the processes of becoming an entrepreneur, his or her leadership features, factors of success, determinants of new venture teams formation and development, new firms performance. The results of this study are relevant for researchers who are interested in studying both the entrepreneurship and strategic management.