Veterans’ Entrepreneurial Leadership:The Content Structure And Its Impact On New Venture Performance

The state attaches great importance to increasing support for innovation and entrepreneurship of different groups,such as college students,returning migrant rural workers,veterans,etc.As an important group of entrepreneurs,veterans have received extensive attention.Decommissioning servicemen is not only the need of the army to update and develop normally,optimize its structure and continuously improve its combat capability,but also the inevitable requirement for optimizing the allocation of human resources and promoting the stable development of the economy and society.Veterans are a group with high entrepreneurial potential,while entrepreneurship is a major option for many veterans after they retire.Under the current situation of large-scale economic transformation,the entrepreneurial environment is dynamic and complicated.Whether and how veteran entrepreneurs can lead new ventures to overcome difficulties,meet challenges,actively seek competitive advantages and achieve good new venture performance has become an issue of the times with great theoretical significance and practical value.However,at present,the relevant research is still scarce,that the content and structure of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership are not clear and its impact on new venture performance needs to be explored.This study mainly discusses two key theoretical issues: First,under the background of current reform and transformation,what are the characteristics of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership behaviors? What are the dimensions and how are they measured? Second,how does veteran’s entrepreneurial leadership affect new venture performance? What’s the mechanism of action? Therefore,this research takes veteran entrepreneurs and leaders as well as their entrepreneurial enterprises as the research objects,closely focuses on veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership and takes "what is it" and "how to do it" as the basic ideas.Based on the literature review,this paper adopts the research method of combining grounded theory with empirical research and carries out the following two studies.Sub study 1 focuses on exploring the content structure of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership.Using the grounded theory method to capture the key characteristics of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership and construct the structural dimension of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership.On that basis,veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership scale is developed.208 valid questionnaires and other 199 valid questionnaires are distributed and collected successively.By exploratory factor analysis,confirmatory factor analysis,reliability and validity test and comparative analysis,the results show that veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership is a second-order structure with good aggregation validity and discrimination validity,which consists of three dimensions: operational decision-making,action orientation and communication motivation.That kind of structure not only presents a new combination of entrepreneurial leadership behaviors,but also highlights "action orientation",a typical and unique entrepreneurial leadership behavior characteristic of veterans.Sub study 2 focuses on the impact of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership on new venture performance.Based on the resource-based theory,dynamic capability theory and strategic entrepreneurship theory,the theoretical model of "veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership — organizational capacity — new venture performance" is constructed.Through literature analysis and theoretical deduction,this paper puts forward 30 hypotheses and uses SPSS 24.0 and AMOS 24.0 to analyze and test the hypotheses according to 253 valid questionnaires.The research draws the following conclusions: First,veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership has a positive impact on new venture performance.Second,strategic executive ability,ambidextrous organizational culture and entrepreneurial learning play intermediary roles between veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership and new venture performance.Third,ambidextrous organizational culture and strategic executive ability play a chain intermediary role between veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership and new venture performance.However,the chain mediating role of entrepreneurial learning and strategic execution between veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership and new venture performance is not supported.Fourth,environmental dynamism positively moderates the positive relationship between veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership and new venture performance.This research is one of a few papers that systematically researches the content and structure of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership and new venture performance.Theoretically speaking,its key value lies in filling the gap among the researches on veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership,promoting the cross-integration of veterans’ entrepreneurship and managers’ military experience leadership behavior research and enriching the theories of entrepreneurial leadership and researches of managers’ military experience leadership behavior.The main innovations and contributions include:(1)This paper explores the content and structure of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership,portrays the key features of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership,and establishes the veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership scale,thus enriches the characteristics database and measurement toolbox of entrepreneurial leadership and managers’ military experience leadership behavior.(2)Based on the resource-based theory,dynamic capability theory and strategic entrepreneurship theory,a theoretical model of the "veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership — organizational capacity — new venture performance" has been constructed,which provides a new explanatory perspective for the study of the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and new venture performance.(3)This paper reveals the internal mechanism and boundary conditions of the transformation of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership into new venture performance,and confirms the positive influence of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership on new venture performance,the intermediary and chain intermediary role of strategic executive ability,ambidextrous organizational culture and entrepreneurial learning which act as a group of related organizational capabilities of new ventures,as well as the moderating role of environmental dynamism.By opening the theoretical "black box" of the path relationship between that two,we have deepened our understanding of the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and new venture performance,as well as the understanding of the influence of managers’ military experience leadership behavior on enterprises’ business achievements.In practice,the results of this study are instructive to veteran entrepreneurial leaders on how to play a leading role,form a competitive advantage and obtain good new venture performance.(1)It proves that giving full play to the leadership advantage is of great significance to promote the success of veterans’ entrepreneurship;(2)It provides an important reference and measurement tool for the development of veterans’ entrepreneurial leadership;(3)It provides a clear path for veteran entrepreneurial leaders to improve new venture performance;(4)It provides reference for promoting the development of military-civilian integration and strengthening the systematic construction of military and local talents.