Entrepreneurial leadership, strategic flexibility, and venture performance: Does founders' span of control matter?
基于507家创业企业数据，发现战略灵活性是创业型领导影响企业绩效的关键中介，且创始人管理幅度（人均管理员工数）调节这一关系：仅在低至中等管理幅度下，战略灵活性才完全中介领导力与绩效的关系。
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.