Examining the Leadership Molecule: An Empirical Study of Key Leadership Roles in Rapidly Growing Entrepreneurial Businesses

Abstract

Previous theory and research has focused upon opportunity seeking behavior as the essence of entrepreneurial leadership, and neglected the role of advantage-seeking behavior by leaders. However opportunity seeking behaviors alone are insufficient to enable businesses reach the next stages of growth. A previous paper has suggested five specific roles that enable leaders to maximize both opportunity seeking as well as advantage seeking behaviors. These five roles are executed by a team rather than a single individual comprising what has been termed a "Leadership Molecule". In this study, we empirically test the Leadership Molecule hypothesis by developing and validating a scale for measuring the Leadership Molecule. We use data from 213 participants from 26 rapidly growing entrepreneurial small businesses based in China*. Factor analyses results confirm the existence of a Leadership Molecule. The scale had a high internal reliability (Cronbach's α= .91) and showed good convergent, discriminant and criterion related validity

Keywords: Leadership Molecule, Leadership Molecule Scale, Organizational effectiveness, Growing pains, Reliability, Validity