| With the advancement of entrepreneurship and innovation and the increase of environmental uncertainty,how to tap and utilize entrepreneurial opportunities to promote organizational change,innovation and resilience is an important challenge for enterprises to conform to the wave of entrepreneurship and innovation and cope with the uncertain environment.In this context,senior managers of enterprises are committed to the practice of entrepreneurial leadership,keenly observe potential opportunities and timely grasp market opportunities,which usually involves organizational reform and innovation as well as entrepreneurial success by creatively solving problems,designing new products or developing new businesses.In other words,entrepreneurial leadership takes opportunity identification and development as the core,driving the implementation of organizational innovation.In addition,modern enterprises gradually get rid of the rigid hierarchy of traditional organizations and shape the flat and flexible organizational structure,which enables the influence of senior leadership to penetrate and diffuse,generating the ripple effect on innovation at different levels of the organization.Therefore,the ripple effect of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational innovation refers to that the influence of entrepreneurial leadership at the top management on organizational innovation can spread to the team and individual levels,affecting the reform and innovation of the whole team and individual employees.How entrepreneurial leadership drives organizational change and innovation at different levels is a key issue for enterprises to build competitive advantage and achieve sustainable development under the entrepreneurship and innovation background and uncertain environment.In terms of the existing research on the effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership,scholars have explored the role of entrepreneurial leadership at the organizational,team and individual levels,and have confirmed its impact and mechanism on the innovation output,work attitude and performance of the organization,team and employees.However,previous studies generally carried out analysis at a single level or only focused on the interaction between two levels,lacking systematic discussion on the innovation effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership at the organizational,team and individual levels and in-depth analysis of the interaction mechanism between different levels.Moreover,such research mainly relies on the strategic entrepreneurship theory,ignoring the uniqueness and comprehensiveness of other theoretical perspectives in interpreting the innovation effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership at different levels,which results in the weak theoretical basis of this field and limited explanatory power of relevant achievements.Overall,the research on the multilevel innovation effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership is still in the exploratory stage.Given the multilevel influence essence of leadership and innovation as the specific manifestation of entrepreneurship,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to combine with enterprise practical problems and existing research deficiencies to explore the ripple effect of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational innovation.In view of the above,based on the multilevel analysis framework,around the ripple effect of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational innovation,according to the realistic background and different research perspectives and theoretical foundations,this study explores the effectiveness mechanism of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational change and innovation at multiple levels,and constructs a multilevel nested theoretical model that takes entrepreneurial leadership as the antecedent,and organizational innovation performance,team creativity and employee taking charge as the innovation effectiveness outcomes at the organizational,team and individual levels,respectively.This study adopts a multi-source and staged longitudinal questionnaire survey to collect sample data from high-tech enterprises in the Yangtze River Delta of China,and comprehensively uses statistical software such as SPSS and Mplus to analyze the data through hierarchical regression analysis,multilevel structural equation model and other methods,in order to empirically test the theoretical model and research hypotheses.Specifically,this study contains the following four sub-studies:Sub-study 1 explores the effectiveness mechanism of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational innovation performance,that is,the intermediary path and situational factor of entrepreneurial leadership affecting organizational innovation performance,from the perspective of uncertain environment and the effectuation theory.The results show that entrepreneurial leadership has a positive impact on organizational innovation performance,organizational improvisation plays a mediating role between the two,and environmental dynamics positively moderates this relationship.Sub-study 2 explores the effectiveness mechanism of entrepreneurial leadership on team creativity,that is,the transmission medium and boundary condition of entrepreneurial leadership affecting team creativity,from the perspective of team behavior process and the process-oriented theory of knowledge emergence in teams.The results show that entrepreneurial leadership has a positive impact on team creativity,team boundary spanning plays a mediating role between the two,and team cognitive diversity positively moderates this relationship.Sub-study 3 explores the effectiveness mechanism of entrepreneurial leadership on employee taking charge,that is,the intermediary and regulatory mechanism of entrepreneurial leadership affecting employee taking charge,from the perspective of individual psychological cognition and the proactive motivation model.The results show that entrepreneurial leadership has a positive impact on employee taking charge,thriving at work plays a mediating role between the two,and employee autonomy orientation positively moderates this relationship.Sub-study 4 explores the cross-level effectiveness mechanism of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational innovation,that is,the cross-level influence path of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational innovation in the above three sub-studies,from the cross-level perspective and the multilevel theory.The results show that entrepreneurial leadership can not only impact team creativity and employee taking charge across levels through organizational improvisation,but also play a cross-level role in employee taking charge through team boundary spanning.This study confirms that entrepreneurial leadership can trigger a ripple effect of innovation throughout the organization,and the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on change and innovation at the organizational,team and individual levels diminishes as it expands out.Based on the above findings,the theoretical contributions of this study lie in: it analyzes how entrepreneurship drives innovation from the perspective of leadership,revealing the ripple effect of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational innovation at multiple levels and providing a new research perspective for the field of entrepreneurship and innovation;it interprets the innovation effectiveness mechanism of entrepreneurial leadership from different theories and levels,extending the theoretical basis of entrepreneurial leadership research and constructing a theoretical system on the multilevel effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership;it applies the multilevel structural equation modeling technique to investigate the multilevel effectiveness mechanism and cross-level influence path of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational innovation,breaking through the research limitation of leadership effectiveness at a single level or two levels and expanding the scope and methods of leadership research.The practical value of this study is to provide beneficial management enlightenment for senior managers to implement effective leadership and drive reform and innovation throughout the organization,which helps enterprises actively deal with the entrepreneurship and innovation background and uncertain environment,and realize the growth of employees and teams as well as the sustainable development of enterprises. |
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