Research On The Impact Of Lead Entrepreneur's Ethicality On Entrepreneurial Team Member Change And Product Innovation

No matter in both developed or developing countries, entrepreneurs and new ventures always ignore the ethical issues when they are making efforts to create new value, which may reduce welfare of some stakeholders. As a result, more and more people begin to pay attention to entrepreneurial ethics. However, there's no consistent explanation of the relationship between entrepreneurship and ethics in existing academic research and business practices so far. Under such a theoretical and practical context, this study focuses on lead entrepreneur's ethicality, and discusses how it impacts entpreneurial team member change and product innovation and its underlying mechanisms and boundry conditions.In order to investigate and examine the research questions, this dissertation conducted 3 empirical studies to clarify how lead entrepreneur's ethicality impact entrepreneurial team member change and product innovation. The first study examined the impact of lead entrepreneur's ethicality on new members' intentions to join entrepreneurial team. Based on social identity theory and signaling theory, the results of conjoint analysis found that the higher level of lead entpreneur's ethicality, the more willingness of new member to join the entrepreneurial team; however, if the entrepreneurial team has received external financing, the positive effect would be reduced; moreover, if the new member possessed higher level of honesty-humility personality, the positive effect woud be enhanced.The second empirical study analyzed the impact of lead entrepreneur's ethicality on entrepreneurial team member's turnover intention. Based on social exchange theory and social identity theory, the empirical results showed that the higher level of lead entrepreneur's ethicality, the less willingness of entrepreneurial team member to exit the team. When enprenreneurial team presented higher/lower level of independent/instrument ethical climate, the negative effect would be strengthened, which implied that there was an interactive mechanism between individual ethicality and group ethicality in the relationship between entrepreneurial ethics and entrepreneurial team member's exit intention. Furthermore, when enprenreneurial team presented higher level of independent ethical climate and when entrepreneurial team member had higher ethical identity, the negative effect of lead entrepreneur's ethicality on team member's exit intention would become strongest.The third study considered the impact of lead entrepreneur's ethicality on product innovation and its underlying mechanism. Based on social identity theory and creativity theory, the empirical results demonstrated that the lower level of lead entrepreneur's moral awareness, the higher level of their creativity; the more ethical behaviors lead entrepreneur presented, the higher team creativity entrepreneurial team would perform. Moreover, lead entrepreneur's creativity mediated the negative effect of lead entrepreneur's moral awareness on product innovation, and entrepreneurial team's creativity mediated the positive effect of lead entrepreneur's ethical behavior on product innovation. The results showed that there was a dual-effect mechanism of lead entrepreneur's ethicality on product innovation, and the effects were completely opposite, which gave a reasonable explanation for the inconsistent results of previous research.Finally, this dissertation concluded the main findings, demonstrated the theoretical contributions and practical implications, pointed out that in real entrepreneurial activities, new members may be attracted by an entrepreneurial team when its lead entrepreneur's ethicality is high, and lead entrepreneur can promote production innovation by demonstrating more ethical behavior. At last, this study discussed the limitations and future research diretions.