Impact of Entrepreneurial Leadership and Bricolage on Job Security and Sustainable Economic Performance: An Empirical Study of Croatian Companies during COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In the wake of the current socio-economic crisis, discovering an effective strategy for managing uncertainty and successful reallocation of resources became key to ensuring sustainable economic performance. More recent evidence pointed to the entrepreneurial leadership style as an effective means for engaging employees in a more proactive pursuit of organizational goals. This article introduces a novel approach to sustainable economic performance during the COVID-19 pandemic considering entrepreneurial leadership, entrepreneurial bricolage, and job insecurity. The empirical study was performed on a sample of 410 employees from Croatian organizations working in different industries during the COVID outbreak. The study results reveal that entrepreneurial leadership positively impacts sustainable economic performance but does not lead to decreased job insecurity. Expectedly, job insecurity was found to have a negative effect on sustainable economic performance. The results confirmed a positive influence of entrepreneurial bricolage on sustainable economic performance, which is in line with existing literature. However, the moderating effect of entrepreneurial bricolage on the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and job insecurity was not significant. The findings suggest that companies can sustain their performance or even thrive under entrepreneurial leadership. The study lays the groundwork for further investigation on how entrepreneurial leaders can influence followers’ creative self-efficacy to decrease job uncertainty and prevent fear-induced hindrances, such as organizational deviance and turnover intention in the context of the pandemic.

Entrepreneurial Leadership and Entrepreneurial Performance in Start-Ups: A Moderated Serial Mediation Model

“…EL is particularly important in the start-up phase of a new business, focusing on empowering employees, which helps to enhance their selfefficacy and entrepreneurial abilities (Guberina and Wang, 2021). EL will motivate employees to be more proactive in pursuing organizational goals, thus improving organizational performance and value creation (Alsharif et al, 2021). Therefore, this study posits that there is a positive correlation between EL and EP, hypothesized as follows.…”

COVID-19 Pandemic Implications for Corporate Sustainability and Society: A Literature Review

“…Entrepreneurial leadership is defined as a type of leadership emerging from the crossroads between entrepreneurship and management that focuses on harboring heterogenous talents and engaging in creative and innovative collaboration within the organization as a response strategy to unstable and tumultuous market conditions [28,85]. Nor-Aishah et al [28] incorporated innovation as a defining feature of practicing entrepreneurial leadership, as it pushed organizations towards risk taking, improvising, creating, and innovating.…”

“…Individual level Employee 37 [9,10,14,17,18,20,[22][23][24] Organizational and systematic level Leadership 18 [19,28,[75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90] Management and operations 33 [7,8,11,12,15,16,[33][34][35]42, Digital transformation 19 [21,[114][115][116][117][118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125][126]…”

The Driver of Workplace Alienation or the Cost of Effective Stewardship? The Consequences of Wage Gap for Corporate Performance

“…Despite possibly generating employee discontent, the widening wage gap is frequently justified by the need to retain and appropriately reward scarce talents of the top management [42]. Since CEOs are held accountable for the financial performance of the firms, it is reasonable to assume that their effort will ultimately be centered on the optimization thereof.…”