3 1. The evolving field of entrepreneurial leadership: an overview Claire M. Leitch and Richard T. Harrison INTRODUCTION Research into entrepreneurship and leadership is not new, but has expanded rapidly in recent years. Much of the early interest in and use of the term ‘entrepreneurial leadership’ was outside the field of entrepreneur- ship or management studies more generally. This includes, for example, research into the semi-piratical entrepreneurs of late nineteenth-century America (Destler, 1946), the transformation of American schools (Peck, 1991), the role of not-for-profit organizations in community entrepreneur- ship (Selsky and Smith, 1994), and political entrepreneurship (Schneider and Teske, 1992). Within the entrepreneurship and management lit- eratures, the term has until recently been more alluded to in passing than systematically defined and explored. ‘Entrepreneurial leadership’ has, accordingly, been defined as a particular entrepreneurial style (Kets de Vries, 1977), as a correlate of corporate performance in different types of firms (Miller, 1983), as a missing element in entrepreneurship curricula (Hood and Young, 1993), as an identifiable trait (Satow and Rector, 1995) and as an important feature of contemporary society (Eggers and Leahy, 1994). However, there have been some salient early papers focusing spe- cifically on entrepreneurial leadership as a prerequisite for organizational development (Lippitt, 1987), on the importance of the entrepreneur being a (visionary) leader (Cunningham and Lischeron, 1991) and on the par- allels between leadership and entrepreneurship as fields of research and practice (Harrison and Leitch, 1994). Both leadership and entrepreneurship are still to a large extent con- tested constructs (Harrison and Leitch, 1994; Leitch and Harrison, 2018). While there may be no agreement as to what ‘leadership’ is, despite more than 50 years of quantitative and qualitative research into traits, styles, contingent leadership, transactional and transformative leadership, and new post-heroic leadership, there is a widespread consensus that it is important and that it is situational. However, most leadership research has been situated in corporate contexts and there has been much less attention given to issues of leadership and leadership development in the context Claire M. Leitch and Richard T. Harrison - 9781783473762 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 12/12/2021 01:19:58AM via free access