Leadership Styles That Mostly Promote Social Entrepreneurship: Towards a Conceptual Framework

Introduction

From the early works of Bowen (1953) on the social responsibilities of entrepreneurs, research on social entrepreneurship has come a long way until now. Unfortunately, because of the importance of the topic still there is need for extra work. This is due to the absence of both a consensus on the definition of the term and lack of studies revealing the antecedents and consequences of social entrepreneurship. As Short, Moss and Lumpkin (2009) set forth in their article, beginning with 1990s, there has been an increasing interest on the concept of social entrepreneurship among scholars. Throughout this period, it has been noted that, the concept of ‘social entrepreneurship’ has been linked to ‘social value creation’ (Austin, Stevenson and Wei-Skillern, 2006), ‘social goal’ (Weerawardena and Mort, 2001), and ‘social enterprise’ (Campbell, 1998) from a narrow perspective of non-profit organizations or philanthropists (Moss and Lumpkin, 2009). Beyond this, in accordance with the emerging literature about social entrepreneurship, the concept will be held in a broader meaning throughout this chapter. Because according to the existing literature, it can easily be seen neither that all the nonprofit organizations are social entrepreneurs (Weerawardena and Mort, 2006) nor all the profit organizations are not social entrepreneurs (Thompson, Alvy and Lees, 2000).

To demonstrate entrepreneurship behaviors, individuals must possess leadership characteristics (Cunningham and Lischeron, 1993; Gupta, MacMillan and Surie, 2004). Precisely, a very special type of entrepreneurship, which is social entrepreneurship, can be best exercised by individuals’ certain leadership behaviors (Cogliser and Brigham, 2004; Litzky, Godshalk and Walton-Bongers, 2010). These leadership behaviors are called as leadership styles in general in the literature.

In this chapter, it will be discussed which leadership styles promote social entrepreneurship mostly or do they really affect social entrepreneurship behaviors by scanning the existing literature. This theoretical chapter has the intention of putting forth a conceptual framework for leadership styles’ enhancing social entrepreneurship. The rationale behind this idea has been embodied by the future research direction from the study of Short, Moss and Lumpkin (2009). Hence, to attain this, the concept of social entrepreneurship will be exhibited in the following background section before explaining the leadership styles, which boost social entrepreneurship most.