Entrepreneurial Leadership as Creative Brokering: The Process and Practice of Co‐creating and Advancing Opportunity

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12573
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Author: Elizabeth Long Lingo
• Published date: 01 July 2020

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Entrepreneurial Leadership as Creative Brokering:

The Process and Practice of Co-creating and

Advancing Opportunity

Elizabeth Long Lingo

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

ABSTRACT How does entrepreneurial leadership drive the process of forming and advancing

opportunity? Drawing from an ethnographic field study of Nashville music producers, I develop

a model of entrepreneurial leadership as creative brokering – the practices and process by which

entrepreneurs lead and mobilize a complex network of actors in co-creating and advancing

opportunity. I find that entrepreneurial leaders encounter three tensions as they advance this

process: 1) generating novel ideas and fitting them within the competitive landscape; 2) incubat-

ing opportunity and seizing the moment in the market; and 3) fostering experimentation and

navigating hyper-competition. I show when these tensions arise and identify six creative broker-

ing practices through which leaders leverage their brokerage role to navigate these tensions in

order to move opportunity forward. The paper offers a model of entrepreneurial leadership as

creative brokering, extends extant creative brokering scholarship to consider more distal market

actors, and shows how creative brokering and leadership towards creative outcomes involve

iteratively stepping forward to infuse market perspective and exert control, and stepping back to

let others shine and co-create ideas.

Keywords: brokerage and brokering, creativity, entrepreneurial leadership, ethnography,

process

INTRODUCTION

Entrepreneurship involves a fundamental process of forming, developing, and exploit-

ing opportunities to create value (Alvarez and Barney, 2005, 2007; Alvarez et al., 2013,

2017). As entrepreneurs advance opportunities through this process, they are faced with

a complex environment comprising any number of actors, including team members,

specialized experts, funders, customers, and other competitors (Gupta et al., 2004;

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:5 July 2020

doi:10. 1111/j oms .12 573

Address for reprints: Elizabeth Long Lingo, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA

(ellingo@wpi.edu).

Entrepreneurial Leadership as Creative Brokering 963

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Pollack et al., 2017). Navigating these relationships may be especially challenging as en-

trepreneurs often lack formal authority over those involved and the path to entrepreneur-

ial success is highly uncertain and non-linear (Alvarez and Barney, 2005; Ensley et al.,

2006b). Tensions may arise as entrepreneurs wrestle with subjective differences between

their own specific ideas for the emergent opportunity and those of other s whose re-

sources, insights, and commitment are needed to develop a competitively viable product

(Grimes, 2018; Shane, 2012).

The study of entrepreneurial leadership has emerged to understand the factors,

behaviours, and contexts that enable or constrain entrepreneurs’ ability to lead and

mobilize others toward the co-creation and exploitation of opportunities (Cogliser

and Brigham, 2004; Gupta et al., 2004; Leitch and Volery, 2017; Reid et al., 2018).

Scholars have developed an increasingly nuanced understanding of leadership qual-

ities and behaviours within different phases of the entrepreneurial process and with

different focal actors – for example, showing how leaders’ orientation towards internal

or external actors might differ across phases or how differing behaviours might be

used with external stakeholders or internal team members (Antonakis and Autio, 2006;

Mueller et al., 2012; Reid et al., 2018; Vecchio, 2003; Volery et al., 2015). However,

extant research has yet to illuminate the interdependence among behaviours across

phases, or how behaviours might be used to navigate relationships between and among

internal and external actors over time. While scholars have begun to conceive of entre-

preneurial leadership as a process of co-action and co-creation – from an initial kernel

of an idea through its further development and elaboration – this work remains in its

infancy (Hjorth et al., 2015; Leitch and Volery, 2017; Sklaveniti, 2017). Research that

can inform a more dynamic and situated understanding of entrepreneurial leadership

is needed. In this paper I address this gap by informing the fundamental question:

how does entrepreneurial leadership drive the process of co-creating and advancing

opportunity?

To inform my study, I engage research on creative brokering (Halevy et al., 2018),

the behavioural practice and process by which individuals strategically leverage their

unique role of spanning relationships between other actors and organizations to create

novel outcomes. Creative brokering scholarship can provide useful analytical and theo-

retical traction to our study of entrepreneurial leadership as it situates action within a

complex network of actors whose expertise, resources and commitment are needed to

develop and advance novel ideas (Obstfeld, 2017; Lingo and O’Mahony, 2010). While

early brokerage research focused on the structure of the broker’s network (Burt, 2000),

and brokers’ ability to exploit their position to develop good ideas and extract personal

benefit (Burt, 1992, 2004), more recent studies of creative brokering focus on how indi-

viduals strategically leverage their role – bringing actors together or keeping them apart

– to develop creative outcomes and solutions (Hargadon and Sutton, 1997; Lingo and

O’Mahony, 2010; Obstfeld et al., 2014). For example, Obstfeld (2005, 2017) found that

actors adopting an orientation toward bringing others together developed solutions that

were both creative and implementable. Lingo and O’Mahony (2010) illuminated how

brokers of creative projects leveraged their role to manage ambiguity and negotiate the

generation and synthesis of ideas – including their own. Yet studies of creative brokering

are agnostic regarding the dynamics among leaders and followers and have primarily

964 E. L. Lingo

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

focused on those most immediately involved in creative projects, rather than more distal

actors, such as consumers, competitors and other market influencers, who might shape

and constrain brokerage action. Examining creative brokering in an entrepreneurial

context can bring these dynamics to the fore.

In this paper, I present findings from a multi-year ethnographic study of Nashville

country music producers, whose work involves co-creating and advancing opportunity –

in this case, performing artists. My paper offers three primary contributions to schol-

arship on entrepreneurial leadership and creative brokering. First, I provide an in-

ductively derived model of entrepreneurial leadership as creative brokering – the

practices and process by which entrepreneurs leverage their brokerage role to lead

and mobilize a complex network of actors in co-creating and advancing opportu-

nity. I find that entrepreneurial leaders encounter three tensions as they advance this

process: 1) generating novel ideas and fitting them within competitive landscape; 2)

incubating opportunity and seizing the moment in the market; and 3) fostering ex-

perimentation and navigating hyper-competition. I show when these tensions arise

and identify six creative brokering practices through which leaders leverage their

brokerage role to navigate these tensions and move opportunity forward: 1) shap-

ing possibilities; 2) cultivating the concept; 3) curating introductions; 4) orchestrat-

ing individual success; 5) counterpointing contributions; and 6) crafting narratives.

Second, I extend extant research on creative brokering by examining how more distal

actors – including competitors and other market influences – inform brokerage ac-

tion. Third, I contribute to our understanding of creative brokering and leadership

towards creative outcomes by showing how they involve not only bringing actors

together and keeping them apart, but also stepping forward to exert creative control

and infuse market perspective, and stepping back to foster creativity and commit-

ment among those involved.

In the following pages, I motivate my study by reviewing relevant research on entre-

preneurial leadership and creative brokering, describe my empirical context, and detail

my data collection and analytical approach. I then present my findings, including a rich

description of the tensions and brokering practices observed, and an overall theoretical

model of entrepreneurial leadership as creative brokering. I conclude by discussing my

contributions to scholarship on entrepreneurial leadership and creative brokering, lim-

itations, and opportunities for future research.

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP

As summarized by Reid et al. (2018), research on entrepreneurial leadership has centred

around five primary areas: the ability of leaders to ef fectively articulate, communicate,

and guide behaviour toward a specific emerging vision or goal; the factors, especially

emotion, that contribute to entrepreneurs’ ability to influence followers and external

stakeholders; the factors that enable entrepreneurs to foster creativity and innovation

among team members; entrepreneurs’ capacity to plan for how they will advance their

ventures; and links between personality traits, personal characteristics, and outcomes of

interest. For example, scholars find that successful entrepreneurs craft compelling visions

and stories (Baum and Locke, 2004), possess high emotional intelligence (Ahmetoglu