The Relationship of Mainstream Leadership Styles to Entrepreneurial Orientation

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to empirically examine through an industry survey the influence of various leadership styles and behaviours on the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation – innovativeness, pro-activeness and risk-taking – in an established company. The findings support that both people-oriented and task oriented leadership styles are important constructs in predicting firms’ entrepreneurial orientation. Moreover, it was found that opportunity as opposed to obstacle-type thought patterns could positively and significantly affect forward-looking perspective and entrepreneurial orientation. Finally, self-leadership natural reward strategies were found to have no influence on the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation; hence, they are not important factors in shaping up organisation’s entrepreneurial behaviour as previously thought by proponents of self-leadership.