Towards understanding the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on organization demand for innovation

Abstract

Over the past years academic debates have mostly focused on individual’s demand for innovation and the organization’s success in producing new products and services. However the organization’s demand to use innovation in day to day work has been generally neglected. In this regard, the present study focuses on organization demand toward innovation to determine the degree to which organizations are willing to engage with and perceive benefit from new products or services, or products or services that embody new technology. Since previous studies identified leadership as an important determinant of innovation in the organization, this research proposes a conceptual framework to explore the effect of entrepreneurial leadership on organization demand for innovation. Entrepreneurial leaders directly contribute to opportunity recognition and exploitation in their organizations. Discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities is a defining feature of entrepreneurial leaders and the degree to which firms act entrepreneurially correlates with their ability to generate new products and services. But what is the impact of leaders who act entrepreneurially on organization’s interest to use new products and services? In order to answer this question a sample of Malaysia Top 100 Companies will participate in this research and the hypotheses are evaluated using Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis which is known as a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique. This research makes an important contribution by providing empirical evidences that may support entrepreneurial leaders and their firms to identify and generate more opportunities and enact them in ways that increase the organization’s receptivity towards innovation.