The role of Shared Leadership in building Purpose-driven, Performance-oriented and People-centric startup social ventures:
An inductive three-path model about the antecedents, characteristics and outcomes of team leadership in early-stage social enterprises in India

Abstract

While there has been a growing academic interest in social entrepreneurship in the last few years, there is a dearth of research about how people lead and follow in startup social venture teams, in order to drive successful organizations. Addressing this research need, my doctoral dissertation used a leadership angle, to understand the development and performance of startup social enterprise teams. While the findings are applicable across different contexts, the primary research focused on early-stage social enterprise teams in India, given the large number of startup social ventures and booming social innovation ecosystem in the country. I used a mixed-methods research methodology to inductively generate and test theory on the research topic. First, through a qualitative study, I conducted interviews with founders and team members across 30 startup social venture teams in India. The research findings highlighted the presence of Shared Leadership in the participant teams, and led to the creation of an inductive three-path model outlining the antecedents, characteristics and team and venture-level outcomes of shared leadership in successful startup social ventures. Second, through a quantitative study, I collected data, using a multi- source online survey, from 70 startup social venture teams in India, to test a part of the three-path leadership process model generated in the first study. The results largely supported my research hypotheses and showed that team social cause passion (congruence), founder’s empowerment behaviour and followers’ proactive behaviour predicted shared leadership in startup social ventures. Further, shared leadership, mediated by continuous team learning behaviour, predicted the overall venture performance in such social enterprises. My dissertation contributes to the domains of Social Entrepreneurship Development, Leadership Development and Team Development literature, by explaining how shared leadership emerges in early-stage social enterprise teams and clarifying the role of Shared Leadership in building Purpose-driven, Performance-oriented and People-centric startup social ventures.