Research On The Influence Mechanism Of Entrepreneurs' Leadership Style On The Performance Of New Venture

New ventures are an important engine of China's economic development,but relevant data show that the life span of new ventures in China is far lower than that in other countries.New entry defects and small scale defects result in new businesses having low survival rate,low legitimacy and limited resources,especially in 2020,when COVID-19's outbreak made new ventures more "one disaster after another".How to break the plight of start-ups and effectively explore the sources and causes of excellent performance of new ventures has become a key issue of common concern in academia and business circles.Business practice shows that entrepreneurs have an important impact on the survival and growth of start-ups.For example,Chai Xiangfei,founder and CEO of Beijing Huiying medical technology,launched an efficient and accurate solution of "image + AI" for the epidemic.Chai Xiangfei adheres to the sense of mission to solve people's livelihood problems and uses the "Ai +medical" model to create value for the society while avoiding the shutdown crisis of new ventures.This confirms what Peter F.Drucker said that leaders play a decisive role in the success or failure of enterprises.In view of this,this paper believes that leadership theory and high-order theory provide a new theoretical perspective for revealing the performance mechanism of new ventures.The New Leadership Theory emphasizes the important role of "value".The leadership behavior of leaders based on leadership style is an important part of leadership theory research.In addition,according to the Upper Echelons Theory,the entrepreneur's leadership style will affect the enterprise's strategic choice and performance.In recent years,scholars have also begun to pay attention to the significance of transformational leadership and transactional leadership to the growth and development of enterprises.However,the academic research conclusions on the mechanism of transformational leadership,transactional leadership and enterprise performance are inconsistent,which raises the question of how to open the black box between transformational leadership,transactional leadership and new enterprise performance.Therefore,this paper believes that in order to understand the internal mechanism of new venture performance improvement,it is urgent to break through the direct relationship between entrepreneur leadership style and new venture performance,and introduce multiple variables(including contingency variables and intermediary variables)to explore the relationship between them.Entrepreneurial practice shows that entrepreneurs' rational optimization of team social capital is the basis for new ventures to break through the limitations of "small and new",obtain sustainable competitive advantage and obtain excellent performance.On the one hand,entrepreneurs need to actively build the embedded network relationship of entrepreneurial team and use the network relationship to reconstruct internal and external resources;On the other hand,entrepreneurs need to strive to create a sense of trust and emotional commitment among entrepreneurial team members,and use collective effectiveness to help members use resources in the network environment to seek opportunities.In addition,team absorptive capacity can promote the interaction and exchange of internal capital among team members,and well help new ventures break through the difficulties such as lack of legitimacy.In view of this,based on the background of the current era of great turbulence and great change and the unique situation of new ventures,taking the entrepreneur leadership style as the starting point,this paper deeply explores the action mechanism of entrepreneur leadership style on network relations,collective effectiveness and enterprise performance,and deeply explores the role of team absorptive ability in entrepreneur leadership style,network relations The mechanism of collective effectiveness and enterprise performance.Based on Leadership Theory,Upper Echelons Theory,Social Capital Theory and Absorptive Capacity Theory,this paper systematically studies the impact mechanism of entrepreneur leadership style on the performance of new ventures.Firstly,through the theory and literature review,this paper reviews and combs the research variables and related theories,and preliminarily defines the related concepts.Then,based on the case analysis,this paper puts forward the theoretical model and research hypothesis of the impact of entrepreneur leadership style on enterprise performance through network relationship and collective effectiveness under the regulation of team absorptive capacity,and deeply excavates the impact mechanism of entrepreneur leadership style on enterprise performance.Then,by means of questionnaire survey,432 valid questionnaires were obtained from Northeast China(Heilongjiang,Jilin and Liaoning provinces),Beijing and Tianjin(Beijing,Tianjin and Hebei provinces),Yangtze River Delta(Shanghai,Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces),Pearl River Delta(Guangdong)and Central Plains(Hubei,Henan and Shandong provinces).This paper mainly uses the bootstrap method developed by Hayes to empirically verify the research hypothesis,and obtains the following research conclusions:(1)entrepreneurs' transformational leadership style has a positive impact on the performance of new ventures,and entrepreneurs' transactional leadership style has an inverted U-shaped impact on the performance of new ventures;(2)Network relationship and collective effectiveness play a dual intermediary role between entrepreneurs' leadership style and new ventures performance.(3)Network relationship and collective effectiveness play a chain intermediary role between entrepreneurs' leadership style and new ventures performance;(4)For transformational leaders,absorptive capacity positively regulates the mediating effect of collective effectiveness and network relations.For transactional leaders,absorptive capacity positively regulates the mediating effect of network relations,while the mediating mechanism of collective effectiveness is not significant.The main innovations of this study are as follows:First,this study enriches the relevant research results of leadership theory and extends the research of new leadership theory to new ventures and entrepreneurial teams.At present,the research on leadership in the field of organizational behavior mostly focuses on large mature enterprises.This paper introduces the new leadership theory into the discussion of entrepreneurs' leadership style.On the one hand,the conclusions of this paper have important guiding significance for start-ups.Choosing the appropriate leadership style according to the place and time is the source for new enterprises to obtain sustainable competitive advantage.On the other hand,the conclusions of this study also have guiding significance for large and mature enterprises.The essence of entrepreneurship is to realize the process from 0 to 1.Under the background of great turbulence and change,mature enterprises also need to constantly change and innovate,create competitive advantages and improve competitive difficulties.The theoretical model of this paper provides guidance and reference for leaders of mature enterprises to continuously stimulate employees' entrepreneurial spirit.Second,this study enriches the relevant research results of high-order theory and social capital theory,and reveals the dual intermediary role of network relationship and collective effectiveness between the leadership style and corporate performance of start-ups.Previous studies on social capital mostly focused on the organizational and individual levels,and scholars have not paid due attention to the research on social capital within entrepreneurial teams.As an important part of start-up enterprises,entrepreneurial teams need to be guided by relevant theories.Therefore,in order to make up for the above research defects,this paper further explores the impact of team interaction process on the relationship between entrepreneurs' leadership style and enterprise performance from the perspective of social capital within entrepreneurial teams.According to the conclusion of this paper,for transformational leaders,network relationship plays the same intermediary role as collective effectiveness;For transactional leaders,collective effectiveness plays a more significant intermediary role.The above conclusions make up for the lack of attention to the internal social capital of entrepreneurial teams in previous studies,and expand the team social capital theory.On the other hand,this paper opens the "black box" from entrepreneur leadership style to start-up performance,provides path guidance for entrepreneurs with different leadership styles to effectively manage team social capital,and further enriches the research literature related to entrepreneur leadership style and start-up performance.Third,this study reveals the chain intermediary role of network relationship and collective effectiveness between entrepreneur leadership style and start-up performance.Existing studies have not paid much attention to the relationship between different intermediary paths between entrepreneurs' leadership style and corporate performance,and the impact of this relationship on the relationship between them.In fact,if we can not fully explain the relationship between different intermediary paths and the order in which they play a role,it is difficult to explain why there are great differences in the performance level of start-ups implementing the same leadership behavior.Based on this,starting from the network view of social capital theory,this study proposes and verifies the positive correlation between the network relationship focusing on team interaction behavior and the collective effectiveness focusing on team common belief,as well as the chain intermediary mechanism between entrepreneurs' leadership style and start-up performance.On the one hand,this study verifies the theoretical inference of the positive correlation between the team interaction process(structural dimension)embedded in the network environment and the formation process of team common cognitive mechanism(relationship dimension)in the network view of social capital theory,which provides a reference for the research of entrepreneurial team behavior management.On the other hand,this paper helps to further reveal the complex intermediary mechanism between entrepreneurs' leadership style and start-up performance,and provides new ideas and reference for exploring how entrepreneurs implement team behavior management to improve start-up performance.Fourth,this study defines the research boundary of absorptive capacity theory,and further reveals the regulatory effect of team absorptive capacity on the dual intermediary effect of network relationship and collective effectiveness,that is,the boundary condition for entrepreneurs' leadership style to indirectly affect the performance of start-ups through network relationship and collective effectiveness.The empirical results show that team absorptive capacity is an important factor for entrepreneurs who implement transformational leadership to decide whether to adopt collective effectiveness and network relationship to improve performance.In other words,when entrepreneurial teams have a high level of knowledge absorption ability,transformational leadership has a greater impact on collective effectiveness and network relations.In addition,team absorptive capacity is an important factor for entrepreneurs who implement transactional leadership style to decide whether to use network relationships to improve performance.Absorptive capacity does not play a significant role in regulating the relationship between transactional leadership and collective effectiveness.In other words,team absorptive capacity can not achieve the intermediary mechanism of collective effectiveness and promote the improvement of enterprise performance.The above conclusions clearly answer the question of under what circumstances should transformational leaders and transactional leaders choose to optimize team management in order to achieve excellent performance.To sum up,the research conclusions of this paper supplement the defects of the existing research on the insufficient understanding of the boundary between leadership style and start-up performance,and clarify the scope of application of the existing conclusions and theories.