Proposal for The Impact of Entrepreneurial Leadership in High-Tech Industries in China, Case Study: Pinduoduo, DiDi and Mobike

1.0 Introduction

Great entrepreneurial leadership can bring unique resources and capabilities ensuring innovation performance and thus leading a company to become a unicorn tech company. This research study on the impact of entrepreneurial leadership in High-Tech industries in China by three case studies: Pinduoduo, DiDi and Mobike.

2.0 Research Question

The purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on innovation work behaviour and opportunity recognition of employees in the Chinese high-technology industries. This research aims to identify what kind of entrepreneurial leadership is the most effective in facilitating innovation performance and recruiting and managing great employees. It focuses on two important elements for the Chinese high-tech start-ups include innovation performance, Human Resource Management (HRM) by the three case studies.

Based on the research purpose, three research questions are designed:

1) What are the divergences and convergences in entrepreneurial leaderships of Pinduoduo, DiDi and Mobike?

2) What is the most effective entrepreneurial leadership in Chinese high-technology industries?

3) What are the recommendations for entrepreneurial leaders in Chinese high-Tech industries?

2.0 Literature Review

2.1 Entrepreneurial leaderships

The concept of entrepreneurial leadership is developed to highlight that entrepreneurs can secure their competitiveness in the dynamic, uncertain, complicated and volatile environment (Fernald et al., 2005). Gupta et al. (2004) define entrepreneurship leadership as a form of leadership which generates visions to organise and facilitate employees to commit to the vision in order to exploit strategic value generation. The leadership offers an approach to explore the impact and function of leadership in entrepreneurial course (Harrison et al., 2016). However, some studies underline other entrepreneurship leadership dimensions including risk-taking, task-focusing and responsibility-taking (Lippitt, 1987), as well as decision-making and vision creation (Fernald and Solomon, 1999). Tarabishy, Solomon and Fernald (2002) proposes more dimensions to the leadership including competent manager, rewarding, communication, credibility, creativity, confidence, being visionary, dynamic market leader, entrepreneur and employee oriented. Harrison, Pual and Burnard (2019) summarise the attributes of entrepreneurship leadership including strategic thinking, flexibility, opportunism, exploration of environmental changes, innovativeness, motivation, proactiveness, preference to challenges, integrity, team-working, positive spirit, planning, technological vision and ethics. A recent research argues that entrepreneurial leaderships require a leader to have leadership capabilities and entrepreneurship mind so as to generate new products, processes and expansion opportunities in current businesses, engaging in social institutions and addressing neglected problems, involving social and political trends, pushing changes in existing services and policies (Esmer and Dayi, 2017). Previous studies identified many leadership attributes and capabilities, while some entrepreneurial leaders in real life lacked some of these attributes but achieved success. This is perhaps because their context Therefore, it is significant to study entrepreneurial leadership in different context. Furthermore, Harrison, Burnard and Paul (2017) study the entrepreneurial leadership in developing countries. They identify four critical leadership skills including technical/business, conceptual, entrepreneurial, and interpersonal skills.

2.2 The Impact of Entrepreneurial leaderships on Innovation

In the dynamic and uncertain environment, leaders of high-tech businesses act an important role in facilitating idea generation and opportunity identifications so as to contribute to firm performance, development and competitive advantage (Swierce and Lydon, 2002). Entrepreneurial leadership is effective to address intensive competition context and incentive and enhance innovation and opportunity (Freeman and Siegrfried, 2015). Van Zyl and Mathur-Helm (2007) illustrate that entrepreneurial leadership contributes to corporate performance by facilitating innovation and development which are customer-oriented and focusing on competitors. Harrison, Pual and Burnard (2019) highlight that entrepreneurial leadership has positive impacts on innovation and creativity thus contributing to corporate performance. These leaders also have the capability to convince employees to commit to their visions and exploit employee performance by motivation and inspiration. Bagheri (2017) study the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on innovation performance and opportunity identification based on 310 questionnaires from employees of 39 high-tech SMEs. This study finds that the leadership significantly affects innovative work and opportunity identification of employees in SMEs of high technology sectors. This means that entrepreneurial leadership facilitate employees to have more innovative work and actively identify opportunities. This finding is consistent with the argument of Harrison, Pual and Burnard (2019).

3.0 Research Method

3.1 Research Philosophy

This research adopts interpretivism for qualitative analysis. Interpretivism interprets observable research phenomena by using researcher’s subjectivities including feelings, experiences, and perception (Myers, 2008). This philosophy allows researchers to fully involve into research phenomenon to perceive and experience thus generating insights. With a loose research structure, the philosophy allows researchers to explore variables related with research phenomenon in a wide angle (Crowther and Lancaster, 2008). More importantly, the philosophy is aligned with qualitative analysis, which can grasp those dynamic and complicated variables related with research phenomenon.

By using interpretivism, this research can conduct qualitative analysis and allow its researcher to deeply involve in Chinese high-tech industries to experience, feel and perceive it thus generating in-depth findings. More importantly, qualitative analysis helps the employees to study leader behaviour and gain insights.

3.2 Deductive Approach

By deductive approach, this research explains effective entrepreneurial leadership in Chinese high-tech industries by existing theories. Deductive approach adopts existing knowledge to explain a research phenomenon (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2012). It directly targets research questions and has high validity of results in comparison of inductive approach. With valid data and analysis, inductive approach may be unable to generate correct findings. However, deductive approach certainly can produce valid findings with valid data and analysis. Furthermore, inductive approach begins with observations and then moves to the design of research questions, which tends to require researchers to frequently change research questions and thus be time-consuming (Wilson, 2010). This research has clear research questions and has no plan to prove any new theory. Therefore, deductive approach is suitable for this research.

By deductive approach, this research will have the following steps: 1) to discuss literature to develop research question, 2) to develop research methodology and collect data, 3) to discuss findings from secondary and primary data with literature, 4) to generate conclusions and recommendations.

3.3 Research Strategy

This research adopts case study as research strategy. Case study is effective to study those research phenomena which integrate into their context (Myers, 2008). Aligned with interpretivism, case study allows researchers to immerse research phenomenon and its context. Entrepreneurial leadership in China is highly associated with Chinese contexts in term of high-tech industry society, policy, market and government. It is impossible to separate Chinese entrepreneurial leadership with Chinese contexts. Therefore, case study is suitable for this research.

Furthermore, case study allows researchers to analyse multiple sources of data simultaneously including primary, secondary data, documents, interview recordings, news and so on. Thus, the researcher of the dissertation can have a comprehensive and deep set of data.

This research focuses on three successful cases of entrepreneurial leadership in China: Mobike (a bicycle-sharing company, Pinduoduo (one of the largest IPO in NASDQ in 2017), DiDi (a ride-sharing company). By case study, this research adopts both primary and secondary data to analyse the leadership of founders of these companies.

3.4 Data Collection

It adopts interviews to collect qualitative data from the employees of these companies. Interviews collect data by conservations between researchers and respondents (Wilson, 2010). This process allows the researcher to immense research phenomenon to feel, experience and perceive, which is consistent with interpretivism. In this process, the researcher can observe and perceive respondents’ facial expression and body language and quick analyse their verb answers thus asking further questions and personalised questions.

This research adopts semi-structured interview, which means that the researcher prepares some questions in advance and asks toiled questions based on respondents’ answer and response.

This research plans to collect conduct 12 interviews (4 for each company). It uses online videos to conduct these interviews by WeChat. Each interview will run 45 to 60 minutes.

Interview Lists

How to describe your leader?

What is your leader’s leadership style?

How does your leader affect your innovation work?

How does your leader inspire and motivate you?

How does your leader help to identify opportunities?

Table 1

4.0 Ethical Issues

This research complies with the University’s ethical code. It is completely honest to respondents and involves no deception. It uses a consent letter to reveal its purposes, aims and what kind of questions will be asked to potential respondents. The consent letter also informs respondents’ right. They have the right to quit from this research during this research or withdraw their data before 10 August with any reason or no reason. This research clarifies involving no commercial secrets and collects no sensitive information. The data will be locked by the researcher’s personal computer and only available for the university.

5.0 Timetable

Task/Deadline	10 June	15 June	20 June	20 July	25 July	30 July	15 July	25 July
Literature review
Research methods
Developing interview questions
Accessing respondents and conducting interview
Analysing secondary data
Discussion
Writing conclusions and introduction
Final dissertation

Table 2

Reference

Bagheri, A. (2017) The impact of entrepreneurial leadership on innovation work behaviour and opportunity recognition in high-technology SMEs, Journal of High Technology, 28, 159-166

Crowther, D. and Lancaster, G. (2008) “Research Methods: A Concise Introduction to Research in Management and Business Consultancy” Butterworth-Heinemann

Esmer, Y. and Dayi, F. (2017) Entrepreneurial Leadership: A Theoretical Framework, Mehmet Akif Ersoy Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi, 4(2), 112-126

Fernald L, W., Jr. and Solomon, G. T. (1996) ‘Entrepreneurial leadership: Oxymoron or new paradigm?’, The Journal of Management Systems, 8, 2-16.

Fernald, L. W. Jr., Solomon, G. T. and Tarabishy, A. (2005), “A new paradigm: Entrepreneurial leadership”, Southern Business Review, 30(2): p 1-10

Freeman, D., and Siegfried, R. L. (2015). Entrepreneurial leadership in the context of company start-up and growth. Journal of Leadership Studies, 8(4), 35–39.

Gupta, V. and MacMillan, I.C. (2002). Entrepreneurial leadership: Developing a cross-cultural construct, Proceedings from the Academy of Management Science, Denver Colorado

Gupta, V., MacMillan, I. C. and Surie, G., (2004), “Entrepreneurial leadership: developing and measuring a cross-cultural construct”, Journal of Business Venturing, 19(2): p 241–260

Harrison, Burnard, K. and Paul, S. (2017) Entrepreneurial leadership in a developing economy: A skill-based analysis, Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development 25(2), 1-41

Harrison, C., Pual, S., and Burnard, K. (2019) Entrepreneurial leadership: A Systematic Literature Review. International Review of Entrepreneurship, 14(2), 235-264.

Lippitt, G.L. (1987) ‘Entrepreneurial leadership: A performing art’. The Journal of Creative Behaviour, 21, 3, 264-270.

Myers, M.D. (2008) “Qualitative Research in Business & Management” SAGE Publications

Saunders, M., Lewis, P. & Thornhill, A. (2012) “Research Methods for Business Students” 6th edition, Pearson Education Limited

Swiercz, P. M., and Lydon, S. R. (2002). Entrepreneurial leadership in high-tech firms: A field study. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 23(7), 380–389.

Teece, D.J., Pisano, G. and Shuen, A. (1997) ‘Dynamic capabilities and strategic management’. Strategic Management Journal, 18(7), 509-533.

Wilson, J. (2010) “Essentials of Business Research: A Guide to Doing Your Research Project” SAGE Publications, p.7

Proposal for The Impact of Entrepreneurial Leadership in High-Tech Industries in China, Case Study: Pinduoduo, DiDi and Mobike