Sustainability, Transformational Leadership, and Social Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which culturally endorsed transformational leadership theories (CLTs) and the sustainability of society, both considered societal level institutional indicators, impact the emergence of social entrepreneurship. Using 107,738 individual-level responses from 27 countries for the year 2009 obtained from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) survey, and supplementing with country-level data obtained from Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) and Sustainability Society Foundation (SSF), our findings from multilevel analysis show that transformational CLTs and sustainability conditions of society positively influence the likelihood of individuals becoming social entrepreneurs. Further, the effectiveness of transformational CLTs matters more for social entrepreneurship when the sustainability of society is low, which suggests the interaction between cultural leadership styles and societal sustainability. This article contributes to comparative entrepreneurship research by introducing strong cultural antecedents of social entrepreneurship in transformational CLTs and societal sustainability. We discuss various implications and limitations of our study, and we suggest directions for future research.

Leadership as a driver of entrepreneurship: an international exploratory study

“…This research focuses specifically on charismatic and autonomous leadership behaviours, believing that these types are conceptually the most closely related to entrepreneurship (Stephan and Pathak, 2016). Authors such as Coker et al (2017), Gupta et al (2004), Ling et al (2008) and Muralidharan and Pathak (2018) conducted studies in a similar direction, as they provided evidence on the association between leadership (particularly charismatic and autonomous) and entrepreneurship. Although these authors focused their analysis on social and corporate entrepreneurship, this evidence may suggest that entrepreneurs are characterized by these types of values and therefore their outcome can be differentiated in terms of either charisma or autonomy.…”

“…According to these authors, these kinds of leaders tend to work individually and support low levels of risk and uncertainty: characteristics that ultimately affect entrepreneurial activity. Gupta et al (2004) and Muralidharan and Pathak (2018) also suggested that autonomous leadership might affect entrepreneurial activity negatively, though they excluded this variable from their analysis precisely because of this negative influence and its low explanatory capacity. Coker et al (2017), at the theoretical level, concluded that societies characterized by autonomous leadership tend to decrease the level of entrepreneurial activity oriented towards social purposes.…”

Does Thinking Style Make a Difference in Environmental Perception and Orientation? Evidence from Entrepreneurs in Post-Sanction Iran

“…According to our results, by understanding the style of thinking we can distinguish sustainable entrepreneurs from other entrepreneurs. Our paper provides preliminary answers to recent calls for a better understanding of the sustainable entrepreneur phenomenon [82,86]. In the Iranian context, survey data from 177 entrepreneurs showed that those entrepreneurs that have other values and that are highly future-oriented have a greater tendency to undertake sustainability-oriented actions [14].…”

“…Sustainable entrepreneurship is a new emerging stream of research in the entrepreneurship literature [82][83][84][85][86]. Sustainable entrepreneurs have a high level of environmental and social concern and contribute positively to environmental degradation [87].…”

“…By including some control variables related to respondents' culture, future studies may generate results that are more robust. Finally, according to the Sustainable Society Foundation, there are three dimensions for sustainability conditions at the societal level, including high human, environmental, and economic well-being [86,95]. In our paper, we only considered the human factor.…”