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International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research
On the emergence of leadership in new ventures

Urs Baldegger, Johanna Gast,
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On the emergence of leadership On the

emergence of
in new ventures leadership
Urs Baldegger
University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, and
933
Johanna Gast
Montpellier Business School, Montpellier, France Received 17 November 2015
Revised 1 June 2016
Accepted 25 July 2016
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence and development of leadership
within the context of new ventures.
Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative approach was conducted to analyze in-depth the
circumstances under which leadership is emerging and evolving in new ventures. In doing so,
55 founder-CEOs from Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland were interviewed.
Findings – The findings suggest that during the development from new ventures to early growth
ventures the founder-CEOs and their organizations experience three major transitions. First, the
founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior tends to emerge and evolve alongside firm development from being
more transformational in new ventures to more transactional in early growth ventures. Second, the
decisive employee selection criteria change over time, and the initially important person-founder fit
turns into a person-organization fit. Third, a transition from a rather external perspective of the
founder-CEOs in the new venture stage to a more internally oriented perspective in the early stages of
growth was observed.
Research limitations/implications – Although the findings advance research on leadership in new
ventures, the limitations concerning potential recall biases and subjectivism have to be kept in mind.
Practical implications – In practice, the findings imply that the emergence and development of
leadership in new ventures should be seen as a dynamic process.
Originality/value – This paper is one of the first to study in-depth the emergence and development of
leadership in the context of new ventures.
Keywords Entrepreneurs, Leadership, Business development, Start-ups
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Recently, leadership scholars broadened their focus to the roles of all the three aspects
that characterize any leadership situation, namely, the leader, the follower as well as the
context in which leadership occurs (Gardner et al., 2010). The specific context of an
organization can be described by versatile factors at the firm and environmental level
(Howell, 1992; Bass, 1995; Bryman and Stephens, 1996; Shamir and Howell, 1999).
Nevertheless, despite the potential impact of context variables such as a company’s life
cycle, its business environment, internal structure or family influence on leadership
(e.g. Shamir and Howell, 1999; Lowe and Gardner, 2000; Porter and McLaughlin, 2006;
Hunter et al., 2007; Seaman et al., 2010), these factors have mostly been neglected so far
(Pawar and Eastman, 1997; Shamir and Howell, 1999; Boal and Hooijberg, 2000).
Small firms represent a specific context that is increasingly studied in contemporary
leadership literature (Barnes et al., 2015). For young as well as small firms, leadership International Journal of
Entrepreneurial Behavior &
has been identified as an essential determinant of firm success and failure (Anderson, Research
2002; Thorpe et al., 2009). In fact, if leadership is not emerging in new and small firms, Vol. 22 No. 6, 2016
pp. 933-957
“process of leading is weak and thus direction, alignment and commitment are © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1355-2554
similarly weak” (Barnes et al., 2015, p. 9) which might be a cause for business failure of DOI 10.1108/IJEBR-11-2015-0242
IJEBR these firms (Gaskill et al., 1993). Additionally, the founder-CEO plays a crucial role in
22,6 determining their culture, vision and direction (Schein, 1983, 1992). Their business
success is said to be conditional upon the insights, leadership skills, training, education
and background of the founder-CEO (e.g. Barnes et al., 2015).
According to researchers, new ventures, however, represent a special and important
context to study the effects of the founder-CEO’s leadership behavior (e.g. Ensley et al.,
934 2006b; Hmieleski and Ensley, 2007) as they are not necessarily equal to small firms and
leadership can be different in this context. Although both types of organizations tend to
be small, small firms do not necessarily have to be new and can be already established
firms. This means that new and small firms can differ in terms of age. Here,
Stinchcombe (1965) argues that new ventures deal with both the “liability of newness”
as well as the “liability of smallness” while small firms tend to suffer only from the
latter. Moreover, new ventures are likely to operate in a special context which is highly
complex and uncertain (Sommer et al., 2009; Ouimet and Zarutskie, 2014) as well as
open, flexible and unstructured (Shamir and Howell, 1999) compared to the context of
older and larger organizations.
Despite this need to explore the details of leadership in new ventures ( Jensen and
Luthans, 2006), there is still a dearth of research on leadership in new ventures (Zaech
and Baldegger, 2014). In fact, based on a systematic literature review within the
domains of leadership and entrepreneurship, Zaech and Baldegger (2014) recently
revealed the young and emerging stage of research on this topic, both theoretical and
empirical, as they only identified nine studies which seek to explore leadership in new
ventures. Briefly, these nine studies explore the role of psychological traits (Peterson
et al., 2008), charismatic leadership (Baum et al., 1998), the individual dimensions of the
full-range leadership model (Ardichvili, 2001; Ensley et al., 2006b; Gumusluoglu and
Ilsev, 2009 ), vertical and shared leadership (Ensley et al., 2006a), (shared) authentic
leadership ( Jensen and Luthans, 2006; Hmieleski et al., 2012) as well as directive and
empowering leadership (Hmieleski and Ensley, 2007). The development path of the
founder-CEOs in terms of their leadership behavior, however, is not yet explored.
Therefore, this paper seeks to fill this gap on the emergence of leadership behavior in
new ventures and the overarching research question of this study is:
RQ1. How does leadership emerge in the context of a new venture?
One of the major issues identified in prior literature is the decisive role of founder-CEOs
in new ventures (Zaech and Baldegger, 2014). Next to founding the venture and
defining the firm’s long-term vision, its mission statement and organizational culture
(e.g. Schein, 1983; Williamson, 2000), founder-CEOs create the context in which they
will be leading in the future, often without actually being aware of it. By developing the
strategy for the enterprise, recruiting the adequate employees, and deciding on
products, services, strategies and markets, the founder-CEOs define the domain in
which the young firm will be operating (Abell, 1980), and in which the new-born
founder-CEO will be leading in the future. What has not been analyzed in-depth so far
is the development path of founder-CEOs during the new venture phase (e.g. Vecchio,
2003; Jensen and Luthans, 2006) and how they learn to lead in their self-created context,
i.e. their new venture. This lack of understanding concerning the founder-CEOs
development begs the following research question:
RQ1a. How does the founder-CEO’s leadership behavior emerge and evolve during
the development of a new venture?
Prior literature has already indicated the importance of congruence of norms, values, On the
beliefs, or personal attributes and values (e.g. Baron and Kerps, 1999; Williamson, 2000; emergence of
Williamson et al., 2002) for employee selection. What is still missing so far is a deeper
understanding of how the founder-CEO’s selection criteria emerge in the course of time,
leadership
leading to the following research question:
RQ1b. What employee selection criteria does the founder-CEO evolve during the
development of a new venture? 935

Lastly, research has revealed that factors such as leadership and human resource
management are typically ascribed low importance during the start-up stage of a new
venture (e.g. Benjamin and O’Reilly, 2011; Mueller et al., 2012). Focussing on other
aspects such as, e.g., competition, becoming an entrepreneur and thus a leader is rarely
top of mind for founder-CEOs. To better understand the emergence of leadership, the
founder-CEO’s focus of attention for certain business-related aspects is studied,
resulting in the following research question:
RQ1c. How does the founder-CEO’s focus of attention evolve during the
development of a new venture?
Due to the nascent state of research on leadership in new ventures and its multi-faceted
nature, a qualitative theory building approach is applied to enrich existing leadership
theory, and to open up the black box of leadership development in new ventures.
Specifically, 55 semi-structured interviews were conducted with founder-CEOs from
Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, focussing on the development of new ventures
and early growth stages.
The evidence presented based on our analysis of interviews can be summarized by
three central propositions. First, the founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior emerges and
evolves over time. Starting off with little to no leadership experience, the founder-CEOs
tend to show more transformational leadership in their new ventures, relying on their
internally shared vision, clearly communicated goals and high involvement and
commitment of the employees. The more the new ventures are growing in size and age,
the more the leadership behavior of the founder-CEOs is changing as they realize that
their initial transformational style is no longer as effective as it used to be before. In early
growth ventures, they tend to show more facets of transactional leadership, delegating
tasks, providing the employees with support and creating the appropriate structures and
processes internally. Second, in new ventures, the founder-CEOs choose organizational
members who share the same personal characteristics, attitudes and values. In this sense,
a person-founder fit seems to be a decisive selection criterion. Again, the picture is
changing the more the new ventures are growing in size and age as in line with this
development, the initial person-founder fit becomes a person-organization fit, implying
that new organizational members do no longer only need to fit to the founders’ personal
characteristics, attitudes and values but to the entire team and organization. Third, a shift
in the founder-CEOs’ attention paid to certain business issues is observed. While the
founder-CEOs adopt an external perspective in new ventures, this focus shifts toward a
more internal perspective as soon as the organizations grow. This adjustment is
manifested in the fact that initially the founder-CEOs are mostly concerned with products,
customers, suppliers and external partners, as those can have a direct impact on the
financial situation and therefore survival of the firm. As the new ventures grow, more
structures and processes need to be implemented, and the founder-CEOs’ focus shifts to
the internal development of the firm and the employees, being internal stakeholders.
IJEBR This paper holds valuable contributions for research on leadership in new and early
22,6 growth ventures. First, this study represents one of the first attempts to picture the
emergence of leadership behavior in the particular context of new ventures, a topic
which has been largely ignored in prior leadership and entrepreneurship research. In
doing so, the results of the study imply that founder-CEOs cannot simply apply one
type of leadership behavior but they rather have to alter their behavior to the respective
936 context, either being a new or early growth venture; founder-CEOs should pay
attention to the possibility of homogeneity in their young firms which can occur based
on the person-founder and person-organization fit; and founder-CEOs should realize the
importance of the internal development of their firm. Moreover, despite the long
tradition of quantitative methods in leadership research (Stentz et al., 2012), this study
applies a qualitative approach which holds the special advantage of taking into
account, among others, the contextual factors influencing leadership (e.g. Bryman and
Stephens, 1996; Conger, 1998).
This paper continues as follows. In the next section, the theoretical background is
presented, while section three explains the applied methodology. The fourth section
reveals the qualitative evidence on leadership in new and early growth ventures. In the
fifth section, the results are discussed in the light of extant research and three major
propositions are derived. Sixth section summarizes the main conclusions, presents the
implications of the findings as well as the limitations that need to be acknowledged.
Theoretical background
Leadership, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial leadership
Compared to leadership research in general, which can look back on a long history
(Bass and Bass, 2008; Day and Antonakis, 2012), entrepreneurship research is a rather
young research field (Cornelius et al., 2006). As a consequence, only a few theoretical
and empirical studies seek to address both domains’ interface which is surprising in the
sense that leadership is of particular importance for the success of new ventures. In
fact, the creation and development of new ventures is inevitably linked to leadership.
Hence, leadership is starting to become part of the sphere of action of founder-CEOs
and represents a crucial aspect for successful venture development (Cogliser and
Brigham, 2004).
In existing literature, the term “entrepreneurial leadership” often describes the
interface between leadership and entrepreneurship. Most definitions of entrepreneurial
leadership emphasize the specific entrepreneurial behavior or exceptional abilities,
such as recognizing and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities (Renko et al., 2015), or
discovering and exploiting strategic value creation (Gupta et al., 2004). In general,
entrepreneurial leadership can be defined as the role that founder-CEOs take over
in new ventures to create the flexibility it takes to attend to, and contend with,
its uncertain environment through the conception and realization of new transaction
sets (Gupta et al., 2004).
In this study, our adaptation of the term leadership in the particular new venture
context differs slightly from this definition. Our leadership perspective is based on
more traditional leadership theories which focus on a more general understanding of
leadership behavior. Here, the definition of Bass (1990, pp. 19-20) is most widely applied
and reads: “Leadership is an interaction between two or more members of a group that
often involves a structuring or restructuring of the situation and the perceptions and
expectations of members […] Leadership occurs when one group member modifies the
motivation or competencies of others in the group. Any member of the group can
exhibit some amount of leadership.” Based on this definition, we understand On the
entrepreneurial leadership as a common leadership behavior which is applied in a emergence of
specific context, new ventures. Hence, entrepreneurial leadership depicts a person who
is influencing and directing others toward a particular way of action or thinking within
leadership
the context of a new venture. While the general definition of entrepreneurial leadership
describes the behavior of founder-CEOs, our definition focusses on his leadership
behavior in the new venture context, which is in line with previous research in new 937
ventures by, e.g., Peterson et al. (2008) and Ensley et al. (2006a).
Leadership behavior and the full-range leadership model

The present study is based on the full-range leadership (FRL) model which is still
dominating leadership research despite upcoming critical voices (Van Knippenberg and
Sitkin, 2013). Focussing on the leader and the follower (Antonakis and House, 2002),
the FRL model presented first by Bass (1985) is one of the most widely accepted models
in leadership theory (Bono et al., 2012; Westerlaken and Woods, 2013). This model
includes three central leadership behaviors which differ in terms of the degree of activity
and efficiency. Transformational leadership, with its five sub-dimensions inspirational
motivation, individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, idealized influence
attributed and idealized influence behavior (Bass and Avolio, 1995), is described to be the
most effective and active leadership behavior (Bass, 1995). Transactional and passive-
avoidant leadership are less of both while the latter is even claimed to be the most passive
and least effective form. Transformational leadership, with its two sub-dimensions
contingent-reward and management by exception-active, attempts to influence the
follower’s beliefs and attitudes in a way that they align with the beliefs and attitudes of
the leader (Bass, 1995). Doing this, leaders can direct their followers toward the
attainment of greater organizational success through common beliefs. Passive-avoidant
leadership, with its two sub-dimensions management by exception-passive and laissez-
faire leadership, is even more passive than transactional leadership and is characterized
by the (total) absence of the leader (Bass and Avolio, 1995).
Leadership behavior and context

The success of leadership is said to be influenced, among others, by its context, e.g., the
environment in which the leadership interaction between the leader and the follower
takes place, which can be described as an organization’s overall business environment,
its company life cycle or its organizational structure (Shamir and Howell, 1999; Lowe
and Gardner, 2000; Porter and McLaughlin, 2006; Hunter et al., 2007). Taking a closer
look at the company life cycle as a possible determinant for successful leadership
behavior, the context of new ventures is different than the context of established firms.
Leadership in the context of new ventures

New ventures typically operate in a context which is characterized as being highly
complex and uncertain with a high failure risk (Sommer et al., 2009; Ouimet and
Zarutskie, 2014) as well as open, flexible and unstructured (Shamir and Howell, 1999)
compared to the context of larger and older organizations. In the context of new
ventures, the role of the leader and the role of the founder-CEO are typically united in
one single person (Dickson et al., 2008) because, if at all, employees are just recently
hired and the venture still lacks structured processes and extensive human resources.
As a result, founder-CEOs simultaneously turn into leaders and employers
IJEBR representing a major transition for them (David and Watts, 2008). Moreover, founder-
22,6 CEOs and their leadership behavior and capability are crucial for the development and
shape of especially young organizations (Kempster and Cope, 2009; Zaech and
Baldegger, 2014). In this vein, theoretical support is given that substantiates the
effectiveness of transformational leadership in new ventures (Bass, 1995; Shamir and
Howell, 1999). According to the FRL model, being the leader, it is one of the founder-
938 CEOs’ main tasks to create a vision for his business that is shared among his employees
which is crucial for new ventures (Bird and Jelinek, 1988; Williamson, 2000). By means
of the vision, the founder-CEOs will be able to attract potential employees, followers,
who join the new venture and thereby acquire human resources that are crucial for the
ventures’ future development (Baum et al., 1998). Based on this, in new ventures,
founder-CEOs may thus be likely to show more transformational leadership which is
strongly characterized by the sharing of a common vision among the stakeholders
(Bass, 1995; Avolio and Yammarino, 2002) and a high degree of motivation, intellectual
stimulation and active guidance (Zaech and Baldegger, 2014).
Leadership in the context of early growth ventures

In the course of firm development, the founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior tends to
change (Zaech and Baldegger, 2014). As soon as new ventures experience early growth,
the context of leadership is changing and consequently, the role of the founder-CEOs is
changing. They are no longer the transformational leaders who clearly define the vision
and goals but become leaders who provide their employees with the appropriate
working conditions and make sure that they are able to carry out their tasks. Moreover,
with an increasing organizational size and age, structures are developed that may, at
least partly, substitute the founder-CEOs’ leadership which, in turn, enable them to
adapt a more transactional, more passive leadership behavior than before (Kerr and
Jermier, 1978; Podsakoff et al., 1993). As shown empirically, entrepreneurs tend to adopt
a significantly higher degree of inspirational motivation and charismatic leadership as
opposed to managers (Ardichvili, 2001). Conversely, managers showed significantly
higher degrees of laissez-faire and contingency reward as opposed to entrepreneurs.
A growing firm thus requires a different kind of leadership behavior because more
employees are hired and tasks are shared which implies that entrepreneurs have to let
go and become more passive in their leadership behavior.
Methodology
Research design
Despite the complex, multi-faceted nature of leadership (Gardner et al., 2010),
quantitative methods such as confirmatory factor analyses, structural equation models
or multiple-level analyses are the most widely applied approach in leadership research
(Stentz et al., 2012). Leadership in new ventures, however, is an emergent and still
poorly understood research domain for which a qualitative theory building approach
seems to be more appropriate (Miles and Huberman, 1994). Due to the nascent stage of
leadership research in the context of new ventures, theory development is essential as it
allows a holistic view upon the research objective (Wiersema, 1995) as well as taking
into consideration the contextual factors influencing leadership (e.g. Bryman and
Stephens, 1996; Conger, 1998). Therefore, and in line with the inductive nature of our
research question, a qualitative research strategy based on semi-structured interviews
with founder-CEOs was applied, facilitating the conceptualization of new and relevant
insights (Eisenhardt, 1989) by means of an in-depth exploration of the emergence of On the
leadership in new ventures (Creswell, 2009). emergence of
As such, the overall research process, which we will elaborate in the following, was
dynamic in nature since several researchers were involved in the steps data collection
leadership
and data analysis, and adjustments regarding, e.g., the interview questions were
allowed in order to get as much as possible out of the data source and to learn about the
dynamics of emerging leadership behavior in the context of new ventures. 939

Data collection
In late 2012 and early 2013, 150 founder-CEOs from Liechtenstein, Switzerland and
Austria were invited to participate in our study, and to reflect on their early phases as a
leader in their organization. These founder-CEOs were selected through three
mechanisms: approaching former participants of a local business plan competition;
contacting the top 100 Swiss start-ups of the last years; and using existing contacts of
the institute. In doing so, a convenient-purposive sampling strategy was followed
(Patton, 1990). Given our interest in the emergence of leadership behavior in new
ventures, the restriction placed in drawing the sample was that the firms were older
than five years but younger than 12 years, following previous studies (Zahra et al.,
2000; Pellegrino et al., 2012). In total, 55 founder-CEOs agreed to participate in our study
between 2012 and 2013, indicating a response rate of 36.6 percent. Compared to other
leadership studies, this rate is relatively high (e.g. Ensley et al., 2006a; Engelen et al.,
2012) and exceeds the critical value of 10 percent which might lead to sample selection
bias (Pedhazur and Schmelkin, 2013).
For the interviews, an interview manual consisting of 17 questions (see the
Appendix) was developed based on a literature review of state-of-the-art of leadership
research, including academic journals and scholarly books (e.g. Hornsby and Kuratko,
2002; Antonakis and Autio, 2006). The initial interview manual covered the topics of
leadership experience, leading employees and the importance of different stakeholder
groups. In order to test the applicability of the interview manual for the project, we
started with six narrative interviews with founder-CEOs. During these narrative
interviews, we observed the importance of the personal fit between the founder-CEO
and the employees. Therefore, based on the feedback of the founder-CEOs and the
insights gained by the involved researchers, we decided to enlarge the initial interview
manual by adding a section on employee selection. The final interview manual for the
55 semi-structured interviews then covered the topics of leadership experience, leading
employees, employee selection and the importance of different stakeholder groups.
In the course of the interview process, small adjustments of the questions and
follow-up inquiries were allowed in order to gain additional insights into and a better
understanding of the interviewees’ answers (Harkness, 2008). As the purpose of these
interviews was to increase the understanding of the emergence of the founder-CEOs’
leadership behavior in their past, the collected data were retrospective in nature,
implying that the interviewed founder-CEOs had to recall their experiences from the
past (De Vaus, 2006). The founder-CEOs were asked to recapitulate in a retrospective
manner on the very early stages of their new ventures as well as the subsequent early
growth phase. In this study, “new ventures” are ventures that were recently founded
and experience their early phases of activity. Without explicitly using one of the
various stage-models (for an overview, see e.g. Levie and Lichtenstein, 2010), this early
new venture phase is typically characterized by a “flat, top-heavy organizational
structure” (Wasserman, 2013, p. 217) in which few employees have been hired and the
IJEBR founder-CEOs play a key role. Early growth ventures are typically growing in size and
22,6 age, and are characterized by a higher degree of formalization and increasing efficiency
(Wasserman, 2013).
Data analysis
The audio files of the interviews were transcribed and analyzed. An inductive approach
940 for qualitative data analysis as described by Thomas (2003) was followed. Being an
interpretational analysis (Gall et al., 1996), we searched for recurring patterns within the
data. To this end, first, all researchers involved in the project (five in total) closely read
through all the transcriptions individually. Based on the researchers’ individual
analyses, common codes were created during discussion rounds in which each
interview and the individual assessments were discussed.
Due to the limited literature base on leadership in new ventures, inductive coding
was applied, meaning that the created codes emerged from the data and were not pre-
determined based on prior literature (Miles and Huberman, 1994). As a result, a coding
scheme was developed which was applied to all interviews with the help of the software
QSR Nvivo 9 (Bazeley, 2013). As subjective and individual interpretation is a limitation
of qualitative research, the validity of the analysis and interpretation was increased
through the involvement of multiple researchers in this project who all independently
assessed the data. Each interview and the individual assessments of the researchers
were compared and discussed until inter-rater agreement was reached.
Sample composition
More than half of the participating firms are located in Switzerland (n ¼ 27; 49 percent),
about one-third in Austria (n ¼ 16; 29 percent) while 12 (22 percent) firms are based in
Liechtenstein. On average, the new ventures were founded 8.18 years ago, and they
have between 25 and 160 employees on their payrolls. The firms in the sample come
from a diverse range of industries but are evenly distributed when it comes to the
operating sectors. In total, 54.55 percent (n ¼ 30) are service firms and 45.45 percent
(n ¼ 25) are manufacturing firms. Individual participants include 55 founder-CEOs
(48 male and seven female) with an average age of 35.75 years who all hold executive
management positions within their firm and are working in the respective sector for
9.95 years on average.
Findings
New ventures
Before analyzing the actual leadership behavior the founder-CEOs tend to show during
their new venture phase, it is worth mentioning that the large majority of the founder-
CEOs in the sample were characterized by little leadership experience gained in prior
employment. Most of them were previously employed with a company, holding
positions without any leadership authority. Moreover, at the time of the company
formation, they were quite young with a range of 25-39 years. Due to their limited
experience, they thus had to gain leadership experience and competence through
learning and so-called leadership-as-practice. Accordingly, all of the founder-CEOs
explained that they had to learn how to lead: “It is a learning process, and right now
I am at the initial stage” (F9). As in the early stages they were the company: “in the very
beginning, the company was just me alone” (F3). Moreover, they primarily found their
firm because they recognized an opportunity in the market or because they wanted to
become their own boss. The fact that being the owner of a firm would also imply being On the
the leader of a team was rarely part of the motivation as one founder-CEO told us very emergence of
clearly: “Starting a business was not a particular move into leadership but leadership
became more and more part of the deal” (F23).
leadership
Being asked about their leadership principles in their new ventures, a large majority of
the participants used one or more of the transformational leadership dimensions, with a
strong focus on inspirational motivation, individualized consideration and intellectual 941

stimulation. A central element of inspirational motivation is the creation and articulation
of a shared vision which appeals and inspires employees. The interviews revealed that
founder-CEOs tend to use clear messages in form of a vision in order to motivate their
employees and make them feel part of the company as one founder-CEO told us:
“We communicate our vision and mission statement with our employees as we want
them to support us. We want every employee to feel part of our company as every
employee contributes to the success of the company” (F4). This crucial aspect of
motivating employees was frequently mentioned by all founder-CEOs.
Next to inspirational motivation, individualized consideration received much
attention. The founder-CEOs stressed the importance of support and concern for
employees as they realized that having satisfied employees can be a significant benefit.
Relatedly, the founder-CEOs were not only concerned about the organizational
performance of their firm but also about the individual goals and needs of their
employees illustrated nicely by the following quote: “Something which is really
important to me is providing my employees with support. I want to deal with every
single person – what goals does he have – and support him in achieving these goals”
(F4). Being aware of the people’s needs implies listening and talking to them. Good
communication was therefore essential. One founder-CEO put it: “Listening is very
important. Listening is not just talking to someone but really listening. Listening
concentrated” (F19). Another one said: “You have to listen, to read between the lines,
you have to identify sign early before it is too late” (F23). Enabling such internal
communication which is frequent, transparent and clear was mentioned regularly.
Supporting the employees also meant acting as a mentor or coach, giving feedback
on negative as well as positive results as the founder-CEO of F41 explained clearly:
“We reflect on both positive but also negative aspects of certain projects and decide on
suggestions for improvement. […] This praise-and-blame strategy is very important to
us and essential for the motivation of our employees.” A large number of the founder-
CEOs in the sample therefore implemented regular feedback sessions or other more or
less formal possibilities to discuss the performance of the individual employees
including, e.g., weekly meetings and feedback sessions. Appreciation for good results
and positive feedback was particularly emphasized as being a task of a leader: “Often
people start to focus on negative things and do not give special consideration to
positive aspects. Appreciation and praise are the most important to me. That is
definitely part of leadership” (F1). But sometimes praising the good things came off
badly as some founder-CEOs admitted exemplarily that they praise too little although
the they knew that they have to change for the better. On the contrary, as soon as
something went wrong, the founder-CEOs were in action. Founder-CEOs thus devoted
time to their employees stating things like “I think the most important thing I learnt
was to take time for my employees” (F35) or “As soon as you hire employees, you need
to be aware of the fact that you have to devote time to them” (F16).
To stimulate employees intellectually, the founder-CEOs regularly offered their
employees time and financial support for external trainings. To give some concrete
IJEBR examples: F3, for instance, provided its employees two hours of educational training a
22,6 week. F38 as well as F40 also invested a lot of money into the intellectual stimulation of
their employees. F41 provided the employees with communication trainings led by
external experts and F37 stimulated the employees more informally as the following
quote shows: “After work, we […] discuss current projects and share experiences and
knowledge with each other.”
942 Summarizing, the observations revealed that the founder-CEOs tended to apply
transformational leadership in new ventures and their interaction with their
employees was close with little physical as well as psychological distance. Given this
limited distance, this study also looked at the founder-CEOs’ employee selection
criteria. In fact, employee selection is the tool to create the context for leadership in
new ventures as structures and processes are little developed and followers need to
be hired. The interviewees pronounced explicitly that in new ventures employees
were selected based on a person-founder fit between the founder-CEO and the
applicants. Many of the founder-CEOs noted that new employees, and especially the
first ones, had to fit to their own individual values and personality. They, for instance,
hired the person “who is most similar” (F13). Moreover, the founder-CEO of F11
stated that he does not want to be ashamed for his employees. Therefore, “any new
employee has to match my moral concepts of my company, as a person but also
concerning the competences, but more importantly as a person.” In this vein, a well
gut feeling with a certain applicant was an important or even the most relevant and
decisive selection criteria for the founder-CEOs.
Early growth ventures

When experiencing early growth, the founder-CEOs adjusted their leadership behavior
as growth required them to do so: “Growth and change of a new venture is challenging as
it is important to change yourself, too. You have to try to provide the appropriate
structures for the change process” (F1). In this vein, several statements suggested that
the founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior became more transactional than
transformational. Tasks and responsibilities were increasingly delegated, the task
packages of the founder-CEOs were adjusted accordingly and the physical and
psychological distance between the employees and their leaders increased steadily,
indicating a leadership behavior which was more characterized by the dimension
management by exception-active. Tasks which were delegated quite early in the course
of firm development were mostly operational tasks, such as the management of the daily
business, as the founder-CEOs realized the importance of a good task division once a firm
developed to a certain size. Within F16, the founder-CEO experienced that “as soon as
you have more than 21-22 people in your company, you do not have enough time for
them. Then you rather hire someone to take over the responsibility for some of the
employees. You have to divide these tasks when your company matures.” To be able to
delegate tasks completely, the founder-CEOs often mentioned the relevance of building
trust: “The more the company developed, the more I had to learn to trust my people.
When you notice that people are working very hard, you have to trust them and hand
over some tasks and belief that these things will be done correctly even without myself”
(F4). The founder-CEO of F5 additionally stated: “The secret is that you simply have to
do it (delegating tasks). It is somehow related to trust and I have to force myself to hand
over tasks and stop interfering.” Accordingly, the task packages of the founder-CEOs
changed. As they were no longer performing the operative business, their focus switched
to strategic questions. Therefore, the founder-CEO of F4 explained that he started “[…] to
read more about these aspects as I feel that my priority is no longer the operating On the
business but more strategy.” The others reported a similar development. emergence of
Our interviews do not present evidence on a transformation toward the passive-
avoidant leadership dimension as most founder-CEOs could not let go completely.
leadership
For many, the complete delegation of tasks did not go without any fear of losing control
and power, as illustrated by the following quote: “Sometimes, I really have to pull myself
together, because I am transferring something which I was carrying out for many years 943
before and I know exactly how I would do it. I know that I can do it much faster than my
employees and handing those things over implies that they are most probably done
differently. It is hard for me to see this” (F5). Consequently, most of the founder-CEOs
kept the final decision-making power by themselves and did not leave the firm with the
employees. They rather remained in charge of the major decisions such as strategic and
organizational questions. One statement went exactly to the heart of this issue: “In the
end, I mostly decide, although we also have smaller issues which can be decided by my
employees. However, larger issues are always my decision, or with consultation” (F3).
In line with the change in leadership behavior from transformational to transactional
leadership the more the new ventures were growing in size and age, a change of the
employee selection criteria was observed. At the point that the company was no longer
solely the founder-CEO but he was surrounded by a group of organizational members,
staff selection was mainly based on a person-organization fit instead of a person-founder
fit. It was no longer sufficient that the founder-CEOs had a good feeling with the particular
applicant but the team had to go well with him, too. In this vein, the founder-CEO of F16
described the person-organization fit as following: “Not his appearance or so but in
principle. Do we have a good chemistry, are we able to communicate.” For the founder-
CEO of F9, the fit implied that they acted according to the next statement: “We hire
someone who fits to us, who makes us feel that this is really what he wants […], who is cut
from the same cloth […]. In case he does not fit to us, we will not hire the person.”
To enhance this person-organization fit, the existing team was increasingly involved in
the selection of new employees and decision-power was shared as the founder-CEO of F12
decided that he wanted someone else to choose with him. Within F1, “the four eyes
principle is important, that you exchange thoughts and get other opinions.” Nevertheless,
the final word again often remained with the founder-CEOs and they did not let go
completely: “The final word is mine” (F21). Overall, the findings revealed that for most of
the founder-CEOs it was more important that the particular applicant potentially would
go well with the team than that he would possess the necessary skills and competences.
As an example, the founder-CEO of F7 explained that they “apply the criteria that the
applicant needs to go well with the team. The second criterion is experience. In case both
matches, it is good. In case someone has the necessary experience but does not go well
with the team – for whatever reasons – he has little chances.”
In addition to these employee selection criteria, an interesting pattern among the
founder-CEOs concerning the termination of employment relationships was observed.
The large majority of them mentioned that their hardest challenge was to let go
employees who either appeared to fit in in the first place but did not in reality or those
who matched the team initially but lost touch with the other team members over time:
“One of the most decisive moments was hiring the first person but especially realizing
that this person was not the right one” (F4). This difficulty is probably related to the
high importance of the person-founder fit which was decisive for the initial employment
decisions. Realizing that someone who used to fit in does no longer meet the
expectations and deciding to fire this person was certainly not an easy task.
IJEBR Associated with this change in attitude toward employee selection, the interviews
22,6 revealed another transition, namely, an adjustment of the founder-CEOs’ focus of attention
during the process of new venture development. In the very beginning, the founder-CEOs
were primarily engaged with issues concerning external aspects that have a direct impact
on the financial situation of the new ventures. Asking them for the emphasis of
stakeholders in the beginning of the new venture, most founder-CEOs identified clients
944 and investors as being the most important stakeholders in the early phases. Additionally,
they were concerned about questions such as which products/services to develop, which
markets to choose, who the clients and competitors, etc. are. Only in the course of time, this
focus switched from an external perspective to a more internal perspective. The more the
new ventures grew in size and age and the more employees were hired, the need for more
structures and increased formalization was recognized, and founder-CEOs devoted more
time and attention to the internal development of their ventures. As an example, F40
asked a consultant for advice concerning the implementation of flexible structures and
processes in the firm. Asking for external help to deal with internal aspects revealed the
increased relevance of firm-internal concerns.
Discussion
Identified transitions during new venture development
Based on the 55 semi-structured interviews, three distinct transitions can be identified
associated with the firm development of the new ventures as the founder-CEOs adjust
their leadership behavior, their major employee selection criterion as well as their
perspective. In the following, each of these transitions will be discussed separately.
From transformational to transactional leadership

The evaluation of the interviews revealed that the choice for a certain leadership behavior
goes hand in hand with the organizational development of new ventures. During the
initial stage, when age and also size are still limited, founder-CEOs show relatively more
facets of transformational leadership behavior which manifests itself in a high degree of
inspirational motivation, individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation, three
of the five dimensions of transformational leadership behavior (Antonakis, 2012). While
the new ventures matured, becoming early growth ventures, founder-CEOs applied
relatively more transactional but no passive-avoidant leadership behavior.
The finding that transformational leadership is likely to be the dominant leadership
behavior in new ventures adds on the recent finding of Zaech and Baldegger (2014) who
empirically observed that transformational leadership behavior has a positive effect on
the performance of new ventures. This is line with what Bass (1985) asserted already,
namely that intellectual stimulation is most valuable in unstable environments such as
new ventures. In fact, young ventures are operating in a context that is highly risky
(Ouimet and Zarutskie, 2014), complex and uncertain (Sommer et al., 2009) as well as
open, flexible and unstructured (Shamir and Howell, 1999). In such a context, a leader is
needed who can guide the organization and its members through this environment by
having a clear strategic vision and realizing the need for communicating this vision to
stakeholders, particularly employees (Mazzarol et al., 2009). This explains why founder-
CEOs play a central role within new ventures (e.g. Shaver and Scott, 1991), or even the
most important role. Business operations and decisions are centralized and founder-
CEOs are engaged in a large number of different activities both operational and
strategic, without a clear separation between leadership and management tasks
(e.g. Vecchio, 2003; Cogliser and Brigham, 2004). The leadership of the firm and the On the
leadership in the firm, which are associated with strategic leadership and lower-level emergence of
leadership, respectively, are united in one single person, namely, the founder-CEO
(Hunt, 1991). Hence, the founder-CEOs are entrepreneurs as well as managers at the
leadership
same time in the new ventures.
The subsequent transition to transactional leadership can be related to the different
context in which the firm finds itself during early growth. The context is no longer a new 945
venture but rather a developing firm which is confronted with different contextual
conditions. In the early growth context, the firms’ internal development gains importance
in the sense that the advancement of existing structures and processes is pushed forward
(e.g. Ardichvili, 2001; Kotey and Slade, 2005; Leitch et al., 2010). In this vein, the pure
substitution of leadership argument was introduced (Kerr and Jermier, 1978), stating that
such formalization and standardization, which is implemented during the development of
new ventures, can, at least partly, substitute or neutralize the potential effects of
transformational leadership. This transition simultaneously implies a decentralization of
decision making and operations away from the founder-CEOs and they begin to hand over
the daily business and operational activities to key employees, facilitating the adoption of a
more transactional style in early growth ventures. The founder-CEOs who represented the
entrepreneurial driving force behind the new venture, its creation and its initial
development, now rather focus on their role as a manager who deals with more strategic
questions. In line with Ardichvili (2001), who found that entrepreneurs tend to adopt a
significantly higher degree of inspirational motivation and charismatic leadership as
opposed to managers, founder-CEOs act more entrepreneurial and transformational in the
beginning of the new venture. Moreover, they realize a growing firm requires a different
kind of leadership behavior because more employees are hired and tasks are shared,
implying that entrepreneurs have to let go and become more passive in their leadership
behavior. This delegation of tasks and responsibilities in early growth ventures is, however,
limited as founder-CEOs are likely to keep a certain amount of decision-making power.
In new ventures and during their early growth, the context of leadership is different and
changing which places distinct requirements on the founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior and
alters the relationship between the leader and the employees. Nevertheless, this conception
of transformational and transactional leadership in new ventures and early growth
ventures with the general emphasis on the empowerment of the followers is in line with the
contemporary emerging stream of empowering and post-heroic leadership. The so-called
post-heroic leadership emphasizes the participation of employees in leadership who take
responsibility and gain knowledge (Crevani et al., 2007). Leaders encourage innovation and
participation in operational business activities and decision making with a strong focus on
actions and interactions. Our findings underline this role of the founder-CEO in the special
context of new and early growth ventures. Based on these considerations, the following
transition of leadership behavior in new and early growth ventures is proposed:
P1. In new ventures, founder-CEOs tend to show relatively more facets of
transformational leadership while their behavior in early growth ventures is
characterized by relatively more facets of transactional and maybe even
passive-avoidant leadership.
From person-founder to person-organization fit

Based on our interviews, the study showed that once employee selection became
relevant for the founder-CEOs, the person-founder fit was the most important selection
IJEBR criterion in new ventures. Founder-CEOs were likely to select employees who
22,6 potentially would go well with them, considering important the similarity between
themselves and new employees with respect to culture, e.g., norms, values, beliefs, or
more general the personal attributes and values (e.g. Baron and Kerps, 1999;
Williamson, 2000; Williamson et al., 2002). Hence, the degree of congruence between the
applicants’ and the founder-CEOs’ characteristics (Baron et al., 1996) seemed to be
946 decisive which is understandable as the small size of the venture implies that founder-
CEOs have to work closely together with their employees. Moreover, due to the
founder-CEOs’ typically limited leadership experience in terms of prior working
positions, their relatively young age and the related little know-how concerning human
resource decisions, they heavily rely on their gut feeling, intuition and learning through
leadership-as-practice (Cope and Watts, 2000; Mazzarol et al., 2009; Raelin, 2016; Denyer
and James, 2016), underlining that becoming an employer and leader is one of the major
transitions for founders (David and Watts, 2008). As the new ventures are experiencing
early growth and the first employees were hired, the firm is no longer only the founder-
CEO but a group of people surrounds him, supporting him actively in his business
activities (Mazzarol et al., 2009). In this case, the previous fit between the applicant and
the founder is no longer enough. Rather the fit with the entire organization and the
existing team is gaining relevance as this fit is found to be a success factor for growing
start-ups (Koprax et al., 2014). This person-organization fit is defined to be the degree of
congruence between the applicants’ and the organizations’ attributes and values
(Kristof, 1996). Accordingly, the existing team is increasingly involved into the
selection process of new employees to increase the likelihood that new organizational
members would fit into the firms’ existing team and culture.
Interestingly, as soon as the fit was no longer given while the development of the
new ventures, the founder-CEOs recognized the need for action and as hard as it could
be they decided to terminate the employment relationship with the specific employee.
This finding can be linked to the notion of the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA)
theory by Schneider (1987) which captures the process of homogeneity in young firms
and has already been observed by, e.g. Baldegger et al. (2014). Building upon previous
work, the results suggest that in a first decision point on the way to homogeneity,
potential future employees are attracted to a certain kind of organization because they
feel that the organization matches with their own values and personality (Dickson et al.,
2008). In a second decision point, the founder selects the new employees based on his
expectations, values and personality. Finally, in the attrition stage, a possibly
misinterpreted or fading fit leads to employees voluntarily leaving or founders firing
the employee. As a result, employees are hired and retained who match the founder-
CEOs’ and the teams’ values and beliefs, as well as the corporate culture, leaving the
venture with a homogeneous group of people with similar personalities and attitudes.
Such similarity in terms of characteristics and personal values between employer and
employee can lead to well thought-through and high-quality decision making (Murphy
and Ensher, 1999). Based on our findings and the links with existing literature, the
following proposition is suggested:
P2. In new ventures, founder-CEOs tend to select employees based on a person-

founder fit, e.g., the similarity with their own personal attributes and values,
while in early growth ventures, founder-CEOs and their employees tend to select
new employees based on a person-organization fit, e.g., the similarity with the
existing team’s personal attributes and values.
From external to internal founder-CEO perspective On the
Along with the shift in leadership behavior and employee selection, a shift in the emergence of
perspective of the founder-CEOs is recognized. Initially, they were mainly occupied
with questions regarding their prototype/product/service, market, potential customers
leadership
and competitors, representing mostly external factors, in order to enable the survival of
the venture. Leadership or human resource management were ascribed low importance
as those issues were rarely top of mind (e.g. Benjamin and O’Reilly, 2011; Mueller et al., 947
2012) and becoming an entrepreneur was rarely linked to the desire of becoming a
leader (Kempster and Cope, 2009). Mazzarol et al. (2009, p. 338) call this situation
“strategic myopia, a condition characterized by a short sighted focus on the daily
operational matters that the ownership of a small firm demands.” During early growth,
this initial primary focus on non-leadership-related aspects of their business turned out
to be problematic in the sense that internal aspects were largely neglected. This can
possibly represent a stumbling block or even a cause for failure during the start of new
ventures and their subsequent transition into the growth phase as the required human
resources are not accumulated or generated. Once the founder-CEOs realized this
issued during their early growth, their focus was adjusted from an external to an
internal perspective as the management of employees, internal processes, structures as
well as strategy making were given higher priority. At this stage, leadership was also
frequently mentioned to receive more attention as most founder-CEOs started to
recognize the importance of leadership for the success of new ventures once problems
regarding human resources were occurring. Furthermore, the founder-CEOs did not
proactively engage in leadership as their leadership experience before the start of their
new venture was rather limited. Therefore, the following proposition is presented:
P3. In new ventures, founder-CEOs tend to adopt an external perspective, e.g., being
concerned about aspects that have a direct impact on their financial situation
and firm survival, while in early growth ventures, founder-CEOs tend to adopt
an internal perspective, e.g., being concerned about internal aspects that
improve internal structures and processes.
Figure 1 summarizes the transition from transformational to transactional leadership,
from a person-founder to a person-organization fit and from an external to an internal
perspective alongside firm development, as proposed in the three propositions.
Conclusion
Present leadership research has failed to catch the development of the founder-CEOs’
leadership behavior in the context of new ventures (Zaech and Baldegger, 2014).
As founder-CEOs and their behavior are critical for the survival of new ventures,
research is needed to analyze their role and the emergence of their leadership behavior.
To examine the emergence of leadership and the development path of the
founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior, a qualitative research strategy was applied and
55 founder-CEOs from Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, were interviewed
asking them about their experiences during the early stages of their new ventures
and the early growth stages in a retrospective manner.
In an attempt to close the identified research gaps, our evidence suggests that
leadership behavior, employee selection and the founder-CEOs perspective are subject
to change as new ventures grow in size and age. First, in the beginning of firm
development, the founder-CEOs show relatively more facets of transformational
leadership behavior which becomes relatively more transactional in the course of time
IJEBR Size
Transition
22,6
948
Transactional leadership
Transformational leadership Person-organization fit
Person-founder fit Internal perspective
External perspective
Figure 1.
Transitions during
new venture
development
Age
while it does not turn into complete passive-avoidant leadership behavior. Second, the
initially important person-founder fit in new ventures turns into a person-organization
fit over time and misinterpreted or fading fits lead to termination, supporting the ASA
cycle of Schneider (1987). Third, the external perspective of the founder-CEOs in new
ventures becomes more internally oriented the more the ventures are growing implying
an increased importance for leadership and human resource management only over
time. These findings reveal that the context in which leadership behavior is occurring
plays a crucial role, and different as well as changing contexts place distinct
requirements on the founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior. The underlying reason can be
the changing relationship between the leader and the employees. In addition, the results
lend support for the increasingly emerging idea of leadership-as-practice (Crevani and
Endrissat, 2016) which implies that leaders have to learn how to lead (e.g. David and
Watts, 2008; Kempster and Cope, 2009).
As such, our findings and the suggested propositions contribute to and advance the
existing but still limited understanding of leadership in the context of new ventures
(Zaech and Baldegger, 2014). Recognizing the importance of studying the founder-CEOs
leadership behavior in their newly created ventures (Ensley et al., 2006b; Hmieleski and
Ensley, 2007), this study sheds light on the development of the founder-CEOs’ leadership
behavior, their employee selection criteria and their major focus of attention. In doing so,
the role of the founder-CEOs, hence the leaders, and their potential influence on firm
development are investigated (Miller and Friesen, 1984).
Due to its novel insights, this study can serve as a building block for future research.
Despite the interesting observations which advance our understanding of firm
development and leadership behavior in new ventures, this can certainly only be a
starting point. Based on the importance of new ventures for the global economy, future
theoretical, qualitative as well as quantitative research is recommended to pay more
attention to the development processes of leadership behavior within new ventures.
Especially the transition from transformational to transactional and passive-avoidant
leadership behavior should be researched in more detail as it would be interesting to see
whether a second transition point occurs at which transactional leadership entirely turns
into passive-avoidant leadership behavior. Moreover, it would be interesting to explore the On the
potential differences between leadership behavior in different but maybe related or similar emergence of
contexts, such as new ventures, small firms, born-global firms or other organizations.
leadership
Implications
This study holds several implications for theory, practice and education policy. In terms of
theory development, the findings reveal that the context in which leadership behavior is 949
emerging and evolving matters. This context can be a new venture, an early growth
venture, a born global, a small established firm or any other form of organization. In fact,
distinct and altering contexts require the development of a different leadership behavior.
Furthermore, the study shows that the theoretical implication of the heroic leadership
perspective should be critically questioned in the specific context of new ventures, and the
leadership development rather than the leader development should be in the focus.
In theory and practice, the findings also imply that the emergence of leadership in new
ventures should be seen as a dynamic process. Due to their limited prior leadership
experience and their initial strong focus on external factors, founder-CEOs are not aware of
the importance of their behavior and its possible influence on, e.g., their employees.
For them, it is a learning process and they have to grow within their role as a “leader,” they
have to learn how to lead (e.g. David and Watts, 2008; Kempster and Cope, 2009) and apply
leadership-as-practice (Crevani and Endrissat, 2016). Moreover, founder-CEOs have to
realize that they cannot apply simply one type of leadership behavior but they have to
adjust and adapt their behavior to the respective context, either being a new or early
growth venture in this study. Therefore, they need to possess a variety of abilities and
skills in addition to the basic competence of creating a new venture. Leadership as an
interpersonal process needs more sophisticated capabilities than developing and launching
products or services and attracting customers. With respect to human resource
management, founder-CEOs have to learn that the high degree of homogeneity resulting
from the employee selection based on the person-founder/organization fit can turn out to be
a problem in later stages (Schneider, 1987; Breslin, 2010). There is a certain danger of
becoming too similar, too homogeneous, as it is likely that firms fail to recognized changes
in the environment or fail to adjust themselves accordingly (Dickson et al., 2008).
The findings also hold crucial implications for nowadays entrepreneurship and
leadership education policies. In the German-speaking, European countries,
entrepreneurship is generally understood as the creation of new ventures (Fuchs et al.,
2008). Neither the growth of firms nor the leadership potential are recognized as important
factors of entrepreneurship. However, once the first employee is hired, the founder-CEO
has to focus on his leadership behavior and the associated tasks. In this respect, the topics
of leadership education and qualification should be part of entrepreneurial education.
Moreover, human resource management traditionally plays only a subordinate role in the
training programs of founder-CEOs. In the German-speaking region, the curricula
generally focus on personality characteristics of successful founders, the creation and
development of business models, the successful market entry and financing of new
ventures. The present study reveals that the issues regarding leadership in new ventures
and human resource management practices are largely underestimated by the founder-
CEOs and are only of importance when the problems have already surfaced. This low
pronounced proactive leadership behavior is closely related to the lack of leadership
experience of the founder-CEOs. Considering leadership as a function of the leader and the
followers within a given context, it is clear that a mere focus on leadership falls short.
The perspective of the followers needs to be included and the changing context needs to
IJEBR be acknowledged. Here, it is not about the traditional leader development, which is
22,6 typically a leader-centered approach (Crevani and Endrissat, 2016), but about leadership
development which incorporates the leader, the followers and the entire team in the
processes of leadership experiences which occur in the context of a changing organization
(Denyer and James, 2016; Raelin, 2016; Barnes et al., 2015).
950 Limitations
This study has some limitations. First of all, the context of the study has to be
acknowledged when interpreting the results. Given the aim to explore the emergence of
leadership in new ventures, the context of our study is very specific and limited and one
might be inclined to wonder if there are similarities in different but somehow
comparable contexts such as small firms.
Furthermore, the study’s central focus on the emergence and development of the
founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior represents another limitation as additional processes
such as group composition or cohesiveness were not researched in detail. As leadership
may not always be evidenced in one individual but rather in a team, future research is
required to understand the emergence of leadership in teams and groups in the context of
new ventures. This implies that other conceptual models and related leadership
dimensions such as the post-heroic leadership perspective should be considered in future
research designs. Recent findings show that post-heroic leadership tends to have higher
effects compared to the traditional heroic leadership in which a lone leader is guiding an
organization (Hoch et al., 2015; Nicolaides et al., 2014). The dimension of empowering
leadership extends the traditional FLR-model by including this post-heroic perspective in
which the leader increases the level of self-determination and autonomy of the followers
seeking to enhance their self-management (Sims et al., 2009). Shared leadership is based
on the concept of vertical leadership (Pearce and Sims, 2002; Pearce et al., 2007). In this
perspective, the leadership task is not focussed in one particular leader but shared among
a group of individuals (Pearce and Conger, 2002).
Concerning the methodology, the data collection of the qualitative study could be
criticized for the retrospective design as a recall bias can occur (Hassan, 2005),
threatening the internal validity of the study. However, due to the aim of analyzing the
development path, a retrospective approach was necessary since the founder-CEOs had
to be able to refer to certain stages in the past. Next, the limitation concerning the
objectivity of the data analysis and interpretation needs to be acknowledged. Clearly,
the analysis and interpretation of the qualitative data are subjective. Other researchers
might have identified different findings based on their individual and subjective
assessments. However, in order to decrease this concern and to increase the validity
and reliability of the study, the multiple assessor methods was applied (Ryan, 1999).
A team of five researchers coded the transcriptions of the qualitative interviews
independently. Afterwards, these subjective evaluations were discussed until
agreement concerning the relevant findings was reached. The presented analysis
and interpretation therefore represent the point of view of all involved researchers.
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Appendix. Interview guide

A. Leadership experience:
(1) Thinking about your career as entrepreneur, do you remember certain events or episodes
which have led to a persistent and lasting change in you leadership behavior? Please
describe at least three of such key experiences in your career.
• What happened?
• What did you learn (in a positive or negative sense)?
(2) Developing your leadership skills, which experiences were important to you? Were there
any critical events? What was your worst moment?
(3) Describe the person(s) from whom you learnt the most. Which behavioral patterns made
this person special?
(4) Which role did your private experiences play for your development as a leader?
(5) Where did you learn how to lead?
(6) How did you and your behavior change during your professional career, positively or
negatively? If you would run into an old friend by accident, someone you have not seen
for ages, which changes would attract his/her attention?
(7) Finally, based on your experiences: in percent, how much talent and how much learning
are associated with leadership?
B. Leading employees:
(8) What are your most important leadership principles?
(9) How did the development from being an individual entrepreneur or entrepreneurial team
to leading a team of several employees take place? Which obstacles did you encounter?
(10) What do you do if employees do not show interest in changes in your enterprise? In
which business areas did you encounter such problems?
(11) Which tasks did you delegate as last? Why? What do you think makes delegating tasks
and responsibilities hard?
C. Employee selection:
(12) In your enterprise, who is involved in the selection of new employees?
(13) Which selection criteria are important to you?
(14) Do you select your employees mainly based on personality or competences? In percent,
how much do personality and competences weight in this decision?
(15) Comparing the past and present, where to you observe differences in the selection of
employees? Where to you see difficulties?
D. Final questions: On the
(16) How do you react today when you encounter problems? Do you react differently
compared to your reaction in the past?
emergence of
leadership
(17) In percent, describe how much time you spend on the following areas. Please distribute
the full 100 percent onto the different areas.
957
About the authors

Urs Baldegger is a Professor for Entrepreneurship at the Van Riemsdijk Endowed Chair at the
Liechtenstein University. Before that, he was a Professor for Entrepreneurship at the HTW
University Chur, Switzerland and a Research Assistant and a Lecturer at the University of
St Gallen, Switzerland, where he was also awarded his doctorate. Next to his academic career,
Professor Baldegger holds extensive experience as corporate consultant and member of the
supervisory board of several young as well as of established companies. His research interests
mainly lay in the fields of entrepreneurship education, transformation processes as well as in the
intersection between management and psychology.
Johanna Gast holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and Business Economics from the
Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship with a major
in Family Business from the University of Liechtenstein. Currently, she is a PhD Candidate at the
Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland, and works as a Research Assistant for the
Montpellier Business School in France. Her research is published in international journals like
Small Business Economics, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing, International
Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Review of Managerial Science, etc. Johanna Gast
is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: j.gast@montpellier-bs.com
For instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website:
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This article has been cited by:
1. NoackDavid, David Noack, MillerDouglas R., Douglas R. Miller, GuidiceRebecca M., Rebecca
M. Guidice. One foot in Babylon, the other in a startup. International Journal of Entrepreneurial
Behaviour & Research, ahead of print. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research

On the emergence of leadership in new ventures

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On the emergence of leadership On the

development of a new venture? 935

Leadership behavior and the full-range leadership model

Leadership behavior and context

Leadership in the context of new ventures

Leadership in the context of early growth ventures

dynamics of emerging leadership behavior in the context of new ventures. 939

strong focus on inspirational motivation, individualized consideration and intellectual 941

Early growth ventures

From transformational to transactional leadership

From person-founder to person-organization fit

P2. In new ventures, founder-CEOs tend to select employees based on a person-

Road Ahead, JAI Press, Amsterdam, pp. 3-33. 951

952 and Research, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 104-124.

954 Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Dynamics, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 13-28. 955

Appendix. Interview guide

About the authors

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