Abstract in English:

While research provides consistent evidence on the relationship between leadership and firm performance, little is known about the mechanisms and organizational context through which founders’ entrepreneurial leadership behaviors affect venture performance. Building on and extending the upper echelons theory, our study uses data on 507 entrepreneurial ventures and finds that strategic flexibility is an important strategic capability that positively mediates the link between entrepreneurial leadership and venture performance. We introduce span of control—measured by the number of employees per founder—as an important structural variable that moderates these relationships. Notably, strategic flexibility fully mediates the leadership–performance relationship only at low to moderate levels of span of control, and not at high numbers of employees per founder. Finally, we discuss the study's implications in the light of upper echelons theory and how they can guide founders’ leadership behavior in practice.