Introduction
The highly competitive business environment has made leadership an integral part of today’s organizations. As Esmer and Dayi (2016) define, leadership generally refers to the process of influencing workers of a corporate so that they can pursue and achieve organizational goals. Thus, leaders must make thorough decisions by crafting and enunciating a vivid vision, instituting attainable goals, and offering employees the essential tools and knowledge to accomplish these goals. Nevertheless, successful businesses do not solely rely on leadership to attain their goals and remain competitive. Similarly, contemporary organizations do not depend on entrepreneurial skills to be successful. Therefore, the ability of a leader to possess and integrate both leadership and entrepreneurial skills and spirit is critical for today’s organizations for them to remain competitive, successful, and evolving. This calls for entrepreneurial leadership, a blend of both leadership and entrepreneurial skills. Such a leader must have a distinctive and clear personal philosophy that keeps them on course and guides how they evaluate various situations and information. Consequently, this paper discusses concepts of leadership and entrepreneurship and my philosophy of entrepreneurial leadership.
Leadership
Leadership serves a critical role in today’s business world since the business world is continuing to become dynamic and competitive. Leaders influence their members by utilizing their leadership characteristics to achieve organizational goals (Esmer & Dayi, 2016). As Gemeda and Lee (2020) argue, the fundamental of leadership lies in the ability of the leader to persuade human resources, which is a crucial source of competitive advantage. An effective leader possesses strong communication skills, self-confidence, perseverance in the face of failure, innovative thinking, and openness to change. Despite the various definitions of the term leadership, they all agree that a leader should make strategic decisions and influence others to follow those decisions. As a leader, I do this by setting direction and motivating others to succeed in achieving their set goals. I also believe that a leader’s role is to establish a trusting follower that improves companies’ capacity to change.
The contemporary business world is rapidly changing and becoming volatile and impulsive. As a result, firms are attempting to cope with such changes by having the right leaders and management teams. Today’s leaders must have the ability to manage and influence people from varied backgrounds, origins, and beliefs. Therefore, leaders must employ effective leadership styles to exploit employees’ potential and achieve organizational goals. According to Yasir et al. (2016), transformational leaders are renowned for being change-oriented to pursue positive outcomes. This leadership style works for me since I believe in instilling beliefs, values, and respect while accepting different opinions. Through this style, I always ensure that I appreciate input from my followers. This way, I ensure that I communicate the desirable standards and motivate and promote my followers in alignment to the organizational goals to attain the performance goals.
In conjunction with my transformational leadership style, I borrow and employ transactional leadership tactics. Yasir et al. (2016) point transactional leaders reward subordinates who achieve their set targets. Rewarding employees is one of the approaches leaders use to appreciate and motivate those that align and achieve set targets to attain the overall organizational goals. I utilize various strategies for rewarding my followers, such as recognizing them in public, increasing their salary, giving small gifts, or offering them time-offs. A transactional leadership style is key to ensuring that all my employees are engaged with the organizational activities and goals and feel like part of the company. Consequentially, these workers become more productive, increase motivation, promote competition in a friendly manner, and boost their retention. Thus, my ability to blend transactional and transformational leadership styles helps exploit employees’ potential while motivating them to achieve and reward organizational goals.
Entrepreneurship
An entrepreneur is a person that creates a new business aiming to make profits, despite the prevailing risks and enjoys most of the rewards. Entrepreneurship is key to transforming industries and creating new markets since entrepreneurs are risk-takers, innovative, creative, and go-getters. Park (2017) highlights that entrepreneurship promotes economic growth as entrepreneurs seize available opportunities irrespective of the available resources. Entrepreneurs have different characteristics that can be used to define them. For instance, they are risk-takers, innovative, adventurous, autonomous, and future-oriented (Park, 2017). Among these characteristics, innovativeness is the critical element of entrepreneurship. Park (2017) claims that innovativeness allows entrepreneurs to manage cultural and organizational changes in identifying new behaviors and ideas in promoting new services and products, research and development (R&D), technological leadership, and novel experience. Organizations utilize this element to promote investments for the constant development of new technologies and the enhancement of products to establish a competitive advantage. Thus, innovativeness is key to every form of entrepreneurship as it allows firms to adapt to the swiftly changing environment of the contemporary business world.
Risk-taking is another critical element in entrepreneurship. The element enables organizations to actively seize and pursue opportunities in an indeterminate surrounding by accepting the involved risks. Park (2017) argues that entrepreneurs with low risk-taking tendencies avoid risks, while those inclined to high risk make decisions faster to seize opportunities. The risk-taking aspect shows the degree to which an entrepreneur is willing to challenge uncertainties. Thus, risk-taking is meaningful to entrepreneurs if they are proactive in capturing opportunities and accepting risks. Pro-activeness is another crucial element of an entrepreneur that allows them to forecast the future when prompted to make a strategic decision (Park, 2017). Companies utilize this aspect by developing new products and finding new opportunities within an uncertain environment. Consequently, proactive entrepreneur competes more aggressively than others as they attempt to introduce new services or products and management systems in their organizations.
Entrepreneurship is beneficial to society in different ways. First, it stimulates economic growth since entrepreneurs find their way to other businesses and markets because of the new products or services created and introduced to the market. Besides, entrepreneurship is a crucial source of wealth generation as entrepreneurs focus on new markets that existing and established corporations do not utilize. Park (2017) points out that entrepreneurship effectively addresses youth unemployment in different countries as it encourages new startups for new bases of revenues and profits. Entrepreneurship also aids in changing society. For instance, entrepreneurship is the source of innovative goods and services that aids society in getting rid of outdated technologies and processes. The invention of smartphones is a perfect example of an entrepreneurial product that has changed business operations and communication. Therefore, entrepreneurship is paramount to developing new products and services, which has an economic ripple effect on society.
Personal Philosophy of Entrepreneurial Leadership
A personal leadership philosophy refers to a person’s principles, beliefs, and sentiments to lead an organization. A personal philosophy depends on an individual’s character and beliefs that are vital to keeping one on the course of how they respond to what is happening around them. An effective way of understanding one’s entrepreneurial leadership philosophy is by understanding the various aspects of entrepreneurial leadership. First, it is essential to understand what entrepreneurial leadership is. According to Li et al. (2020), entrepreneurial leadership directs and influences synergetic performance toward achieving organizational goals relating to recognizing and exploiting possibilities that influence the success of entrepreneurial leadership. Yasir et al. (2016) further define entrepreneurial leadership as a type of leadership made up of activities towards creating a business at a personal level by exploiting inventions at the managerial level and actions towards aiding the prospects at the market level. In this case, I perceive entrepreneurial leadership as a blend of leadership skills with an entrepreneurial spirit. Thus, an entrepreneurial leader aids a company in turning problems into opportunities that have social and economic value. I believe that an entrepreneurial leader should have entrepreneurial characteristics such as being a risk-taker, innovative, proactive, and productive.
My perception of a leader is an individual who creates a vision, inspires others and aligns them with pursuing it. Thus, an entrepreneurial leader exhibits various characteristics that are a blend of both a leader and an entrepreneur. In this case, an entrepreneurial leader should support entrepreneurial skills by considering the human element as the key source of entrepreneurial behavior and supporting them. In this case, as an entrepreneurial leader, I aspire to foster and stimulate innovative work behavior from workers for improved organizational performance. The social cognitive theory will support my actions to understand the mechanisms through which entrepreneurial leadership influences workers’ innovative work behavior. According to Li et al. (2020), the social cognitive theory claims a mutual rapport exists between a person’s characteristics and environmental and behavioral factors. Thus, people with a high-efficiency level perform more challenging and risky tasks compared to their counterparts who perceive the challenging tasks as dangerous and uncertain.
I believe that the efficiency of an entrepreneurial leader depends on the way they promote a culture of entrepreneurship within the organization. To achieve this, I will ensure that I empower my followers to enhance their entrepreneurial self-efficacy to boost their innovative behavior and augment their creativity. As Li et al. (2020) opine, it is possible to assess the moderating role that entrepreneurial self-efficacy has on the entrepreneurial results in a company. In this case, I understand that it is not the sole role of entrepreneurial leaders to identify and create new ideas; instead, they should ease and embolden their employees to showcase their potential in solving intricate problems and execute challenging tasks by utilizing innovative means. As an entrepreneurial leader, I aspire to establish workers’ commitment and persistence in encouraging their colleagues to generate new ideas and gain their support in realizing them. I will spearhead the innovative process by establishing a favorable environment where all workers can be stimulated to contribute to innovative practices and participate in the generation and utilization of new ideas (Li et al., 2020). This behavior is crucial in the current challenging and competitive business environment by promoting the generation and realization of new ideas.
Entrepreneurial leaders should utilize the characteristics of both an entrepreneur and a leader in leading the innovation process of their organization. I believe that an entrepreneurial leader’s role is to enable and stimulate their followers to discard their conventional way of executing tasks and directing their energy toward performing entrepreneurial and innovative tasks. Li et al. (2020) posit that entrepreneurial leaders’ role is to remodel their followers’ perceptions of their competencies by engaging them in evolving new and innovative ideas and building their poise in implementing these ideas. Likewise, it is within my functional competencies as an entrepreneurial leader to empower my followers by inspiring and regulating them toward innovation. In this case, I have to create an encouraging environment and an inspiring culture that will enable my group members to ruminate innovation as their primary task and exhibit perseverance in facing challenges incurred during the innovation process. The resulting effect is establishing an innovative culture led by a visionary, determined, risk-taking, and innovative leader.
An organization’s working environment dictates the behaviors and actions exhibited by its workers. An entrepreneurial leader’s role is to form and shape a company’s environment that aligns with the desired behaviors and actions. Consequently, I look forward to establishing an innovative environment that will allow employees to learn procedures, practice, and endorse behaviors that encourage their ability to generate, introduce, and realize new ideas (Li et al., 2020). Besides, I will foster confidence among my followers by proposing new and innovative ideas without fear. My ability to value and establish a promising innovative environment will encourage my followers to be innovative and identify new and creative solutions to problems faced in the workplace. In addition, I will serve as a clear reflection of who an innovative leader is to my group members. As Li et al. (2020) demonstrate, workers, regulate their behaviors depending on the conduct of their immediate coworkers and leaders. Therefore, I will adopt an innovative behavior and culture that will serve as a guiding principle to my followers to guide and aid them in embracing the innovative culture. The move will be vital in establishing and nurturing an innovative environment that will help me exploit intellectual assets to remain competitive in the dynamic business world. Thus, as an entrepreneurial leader, I will establish and spearhead an innovative environment and culture that will see my followers embrace and exhibit innovative behaviors and actions for the ease of identifying new ideas without any hesitation.
Conclusion
The various definitions of the term leadership congregate at the ability of a person to guide others in pursuing specific goals. An effective leader is visionary, innovative, a risk-taker, confident, and has management and communication skills. Currently, organizations are facing stiff competition from the dynamic business environment. This calls for effective leadership strategies that will aid them in remaining competitive amidst changes and challenges. As a leader, I inspire to integrate the concepts of both transactional and transformational leadership styles as they focus on rewarding, motivating, and inspiring employees toward achieving organizational goals. Besides, entrepreneurship functions as the backbone of economic growth since entrepreneurs focus on seizing opportunities despite the available resources. The three significant elements of entrepreneurship are risk-taking, proactive, and innovative which enable one to identify new ideas, capture opportunities in uncertain situations, and forecast a future opportunity. A combination of leadership and entrepreneurial traits leads to entrepreneurial leadership that is key to establishing innovative behavior and culture. My entrepreneurial leadership philosophy is to support entrepreneurial behavior amongst my followers. I also intend to spearhead this culture by fostering confidence among my employees by encouraging them to propose new ideas without fear. Besides, I will redesign the perceptions of my followers’ competencies regarding identifying, introducing, and implementing new ideas. As a result, my organization will stand in the current dynamic and challenging business environment since we will collaboratively solve problems and create new solutions, products, and services beyond the current market reach.
References
Esmer, Y., & Faruk, D. A. Y. I. (2016). Entrepreneurial leadership: A theoretical research. In Proceedings of International Academic Conferences (No. 4106478). International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences.
Gemeda, H. K., & Lee, J. (2020). Leadership styles, work engagement and outcomes among information and communications technology professionals: A cross-national study. Heliyon, 6(4), 1-10. Web.
Li, C., Makhdoom, H. U. R., & Asim, S. (2020). Impact of entrepreneurial leadership on innovative work behavior: Examining and moderation mechanisms. Psychology research and behavior management, 13, 105-118. Web.
Park, C. (2017). A study on the effect of entrepreneurship on entrepreneurial intention: focusing on ICT majors. Asia Pacific Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurshi, 11(2), 159-170. Web.
Yasir, M., Imran, R., Irshad, M. K., Mohamad, N. A., & Khan, M. M. (2016). Leadership styles in relation to employees’ trust and organizational change capacity: Evidence from non-profit organizations. Sage Open, 6(4), 1-12. Web.