Entrepreneurial teams often struggle with simultaneous task and team challenges at an early stage of new venture creation. The way in which teams shape their teamwork is key in leveraging performance in the pre-founding phase. Learning should help the team in establishing good teamwork and in expanding its members entrepreneurial capabilities. Leadership is needed to facilitate and guide this learning. Accordingly, we investigated learning and leadership as facilitators of performance in the pre-founding phase. Specifically, we examined team reflexivity as a collective internal learning process and boundary spanning behaviour as an externally directed individual activity, operating at different levels in fostering team and individual performance. Charismatic team leadership was examined as a catalyst of learning, shaping team and individual performance ultimately. The multilevel mediation model was tested based on data from 196 members of 58 teams of a venture creation programme. Team reflexivity predicted team and individual performance. Boundary spanning behaviour was not related to performance. As hypothesised, charismatic team leadership predicted team and individual performance, both mediated by team reflexivity. This research highlights the relevance of team learning in pre-founding teams and emphasises leadership in shaping learning and moving new ventures forward.

Volunteer coordinators' leadership plays a central role in the efforts to retain volunteers and increase their commitment to an organization; however, research on volunteers' perceptions of their leaders is scarce. Given the challenges of leading volunteers, we present two studies to investigate the effectiveness of consideration and initiating structure for volunteer coordinators. First, we theorized and tested how well findings from the business and government sectors fit today's volunteer domain by studying volunteers' perceptions of their current coordinators' leadership. Using a sample of volunteers across the nonprofit sector, we found that consideration and initiating structure were related to different criteria. Initiating structure was positively related to volunteers' feelings of competence and to role clarity, while consideration was negatively related to burnout. Both leader behaviors were positively related to volunteers' satisfaction with their coordinator. In our second study, using a different sample of volunteers in nonprofit organizations, we employ a vignette study design to show how the gender of the coordinator influences the perception of his or her behavior. By manipulating the coordinators' gender via vignette descriptions, we found evidence of the communality‐bonus effect for men as men coordinators' leadership effectiveness was rated higher than women coordinators' effectiveness when displaying gender stereotype incongruent consideration behaviors. On the other hand, there was no difference between leaders' genders regarding initiating structure. Volunteers' satisfaction with their coordinator did not differ significantly based on coordinators' gender. We share several practical and theoretical implications of these findings for leaders of volunteers.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract