Leadership practices within the start-up environment

: a research on the impact of leadership on the development of today’s startups

Abstract

Startups have become a familiar concept to most people, however there is still much to learn about this new reality and their business models. These new ventures live in an environment particularly unstable and volatile, which affects the experience that employees have. As teams are one of the most important success factors of startups, they deserve special attention, looking into practices that might be better for them. Leadership has been pointed out as crucial in a startup development. Even though the literature is not extensive on this subject, it can be stated that the establishment and growth of startups are inextricably linked to leadership. Therefore, leadership practices might also have an impact on a startup’s environment and, consequently, provide a positive/negative experience to employees. Considering this, the present research gathers the insights of both followers and leaders from three different startups, through both interviews and focus group. In this way, within a previously presented revision of literature, it was possible to better understand how both leaders and followers were envisioning leadership practices within teams, as well as validate with each participant if the environment matched with the ones put forward by the literature. Our research suggests that not only the environment matches what it is claimed in general in the literature, but also that leadership practices have indeed a generally positive impact on startup’s environment. However, leadership practices still relly very much on the leaders themselves, instead of being built into the startups DNA.

Date of Award	9 Feb 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Fernando Ilharco (Supervisor)