Can CEO’s Humble Leadership Behavior Really Improve Enterprise Performance and Sustainability? A Case Study of Chinese Start-Up Companies

Abstract

The relationship between the leadership behavior of a chief executive officer (CEO) and start-up enterprise performance is key to effecting the survival and development of start-ups in the era of the internet economy. Currently, most studies on this topic focus more on the role of leadership effectiveness but rarely explore the CEO’s humility in leadership and the mechanism of its behavior affecting enterprise performance and its sustainable development. Based on leadership theory and upper-echelon theory, we build a research model of CEO’s humble leadership behavior, top management team’s (TMT’s) transactive memory system, and start-up enterprise performance, as well as the moderating roles exerted by strategic flexibility. Further, to validate the hypothesis, 400 valid questionnaires are obtained. Based on those data, the empirical results show humility, as a virtue, not only can significantly and positively improve start-up firm performance but also can promote the firm’s sustainable development in the long run by providing a trustworthiness climate for TMT members. Moreover, TMT’s transactive memory systems play a partial mediating role in the relationship between CEO’s humble leadership behavior and start-up enterprise performance. Meanwhile, strategic flexibility significantly and positively moderates the relationship between CEO’s humble leadership behavior and startup entrepreneurial performance. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and directions for future research are proposed.

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Authentic Leadership Fostering Creativity in Start-ups: Mediating Role of Work Engagement and Employee Task Proactivity

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“…For corporate sustainable growth, the effects of CEO demographic characteristics such as age (Garces-Galdeano and Garcia-Olaverri, 2019; Malik et al , 2020), education (Garces-Galdeano and Garcia-Olaverri, 2019; Malik et al , 2020) and gender (Gatautis et al , 2019) and managerial characteristics such as tenure (Malik et al , 2020) and duality (Nassem et al , 2020), as well as psychological traits such as overconfidence (Guo and Ding, 2019) or humbleness (Ren et al , 2020), narcissism (Kashmiri et al , 2017) and personality (Wang and Chen, 2020) and ethics (Zhao et al , 2020) were repeatedly reported in previous studies. Through in-depth analysis, we can find that the essence of the fore-mentioned CEO demographic and managerial characteristics is the one’s education experience, management skills and the cognitive capabilities increasing with the growth of age.…”