| Since 2015, Chinese government vigorously has advocated mass entrepreneurship and innovation, entrepreneurship has become one of the hottest issues of China’s current economic activities. The essence of entrepreneurship is innovation, which is especially important for technology new ventures. Realizing innovation and promoting innovation performance effectively become extremely urgent for firms For new ventures, entrepreneur’s leadership behavior is an important factor that affects innovation performance. As relationship between entrepreneur’s leadership style and innovation performance, and their internal influence mechanism is the main concern,this study suggests that knowledge acquisition plays a crucial role in the influence mechanism.The purpose of this study is to answer three questions: first, in new venture’s survival stage and growth stage, what’re the differences in the influence of entrepreneur’s leadership styles on innovation performance, and how does the leadership style match with new venture’s different stages; second, what’re the differences in the influence of entrepreneur’s leadership styles on internal and external knowledge acquisition between new venture’s survival stage and growth stage; third,using knowledge acquisition as a mediating variable, what’s the influence mechanism of entrepreneur’s leadership style on innovation performance in new venture’s survival stage and growth stage. This study provides theoretical instruction and referable implementing approach for technology new ventures to choose effective leadership style, in order to improve firms’ innovation performance by promoting knowledge acquisition behavior under the transition economy background.In order to answer the key questions above, this paper takes Upper echelon theory,Knowledge-based view and Contingency theory as the theoretical basis, meanwhile systematically reviews the related theoretical literature on new venture’s leadershipstyle, the characteristic of survival stage and growth stage, knowledge acquisition and innovation performance, and reviews the contribution and insufficient of existing literature. For the model building, this paper first defines the related variable’s connotation and dimension, based on the theoretical basis and literature study, we preliminarily build the theoretical model between new venture leadership style,knowledge acquisition and innovation performance based on the theoretic logic between these variables. Then a case study is conducted to validate and modify the preliminary theoretical model. The key point of case study is to compare and refine the revolution of influence relationship between the main variables of new venture’s survival stage and growth stage. Based on the interviews, data coding, research analysis of 7 technology new ventures, this study conducts a standardized case study method to compare and refine the evolution of the relationship among these variables between survival stage and growth stage. Finally, based on the characteristic of survival and growth stages, this paper proposes a two-stage research model of‘entrepreneur’s leadership style- new venture’s knowledge acquisition- new venture’s innovation performance’. For the research hypothesis, on the basis of new venture’s survival and growth stages’ characteristics, raise 26 hypothesis about the relationship between the three variables above. For the empirical research, by a scientific reserach design, use technology new ventures as research objects, collecting data from 315 technology new ventures in Harbin, Changchun, Beijing and Shanghai etc., including153 survival ones and 162 growth ones through a large scale questionnaire survey.Then use SPSS20.0 to analyze the data.The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1) paternalistic leadership and transformational leadership influence new venture’s innovation performance differently in technology new venture’s survival stage and growth stage: in survival stage, the entrepreneur’s two kinds of leadership styles both positively effect innovation performance, while paternalistic leadership works stronger than transformational leadership. Therefore, at this stage the entrepreneur should choose paternalistic leadership as dominant leadership style, transformational leadership as supplement style. In growth stage, transformational leadership positively effectsinnovation performance, and works stronger than paternalistic leadership, however,paternalistic leadership negatively effect innovation performance. Considering of innovation, in this stage entrepreneur should choose transformational leadership instead of paternalistic leadership;(2) different entrepreneur’s leadership style will influence new venture’s knowledge acquisition behavior both in technology new venture’s survival stage and growth stage: in survival stage, paternalistic leadership and transformational leadership can both positively effect new venture’s internal and external knowledge acquisition, while in growth stage, transformational leadership style can positively effect internal and external knowledge acquisition, and paternalistic leadership has no significant effect on internal knowledge acquisition,but negative effect on external knowledge acquisition;(3) knowledge acquisition plays an mediating role between entrepreneur’s leadership style and innovation performance both in survival stage and growth stage: in survival stage, paternalistic leadership and transformational leadership style positively effect new venture’s internal and external knowledge acquisition, then further influence innovation performance. In another word, internal and external knowledge acquisition can both mediate the relationship between paternalistic leadership / transformational leadership and innovation performance; in growth stage, transformational leadership can positively effect internal and external knowledge acquisition behavior, further influence innovation performance, that is, internal and external knowledge acquisition can mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and innovation performance, while external knowledge acquisition can play a mediating role between paternalistic leadership and innovation performance, but the mediating role of internal knowledge acquisition in relationship between paternalistic leadership and innovation performance is not significant.The innovations of this paper are as follows:(1) based on a multiple case study using Grounded theory and Contingency theory, this study explores the dynamic evolution process of different leadership styles in different development stages of technology new venture, which enriches the leadership theory by adding comparative analysis of different leadership styles and the dynamic evolution of leadership style;(2) based on upper echelons theory, this study explores and compares the influence of entrepreneurs’ different leadership styles on new venture’s knowledge acquisition,which enriches the theoretical and empirical research on organization learning and knowledge management;(3) based on knowledge-based view, employing knowledge acquisition as a mediating variable, this paper explores the mechanism of the relationship between entrepreneur’s different leadership styles and new venture’s innovation performance in Chinese technology new ventures. |
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