The Impact of Leadership Styles on Employee Entrepreneurial Orientation and Innovative Behavior: A Comparative Analysis of American and Indian Immigrant Entrepreneurs

There is a dearth of literature on leadership styles' effect on innovative behavior and entrepreneurial orientation within the context of American and Indian immigrant firms. This study fills the gaps in the literature with focus on the leadership styles' impact on American and Indian immigrant employees employed in small- and medium-sized firms. Theses styles have been understudied regarding the impact germane to employee behavior, despite the current rise in American entrepreneurial firms and the recent spike in Indian immigrant entrepreneurial venture firms operated in the United States. The quantitative research design made it possible to garner a rich amount of data, collected from both American and Indian immigrant firms located in the Research Triangle Park area. The firms in which the samples were drawn represented industries that include technology, sales, grocers, hospitality, and finance. The total overall sample size was 321. The American sample respondent size was 161, and Indian immigrant sample size was 160. These data were analyzed with hierarchical regression analysis and multivariate analysis of variance. After analyzing and testing the hypotheses, results showed there are statistical significant differences in leadership styles between American and Indian immigrant entrepreneurial leaders. The results indicate that transformational leadership style has a statistical significant positive impact on innovative behavior in the context of an Indian immigrant firm; transactional leadership style had a statistical significant positive impact on innovative behavior in American firms and a statistically significant positive impact on entrepreneurial orientation in Indian immigrant firms. The study findings reflect the importance of leadership styles and the impact they have on employee behavior in the workplace. Ingenuity, idea creation, and idea implementation in the workplace play a large part in remaining competitive. Risk taking and proactiveness are behaviors that enable employees to harness future-orientated opportunities for the firm. Therefore, transformational and transactional styles are positively related to increasing employees' innovative and entrepreneurial behaviors.