The power of role models in a team: The impact of lead entrepreneur's digital leadership on digital entrepreneurial success

Digital entrepreneurial success has gained attention because the development of digitalization has brought multiple opportunities for entrepreneurs along with many challenges. While prior research has primarily examined the determinants of success at the founder and organizational levels, the impact of venture groups has been neglected, resulting in a lack of exploration of the group effect. In this study, we apply social learning theory to investigate how lead entrepreneur's digital leadership influences digital entrepreneurial success. By analyzing data from 88 digital entrepreneurial teams, we found that lead entrepreneur's digital leadership is positively related to entrepreneurial team's digital entrepreneurial success. Likewise, lead entrepreneur's digital leadership positively correlates with digital entrepreneurial success through technology absorptive capacity and technological innovation capability. Moreover, we argue that leader group prototypicality not only strengthens the impact of lead entrepreneur's digital leadership on the entrepreneurial team's technology absorptive capacity but also amplifies its influence on the entrepreneurial team's technological innovation capability. Our results provide contributions to both the entrepreneurship and leadership literature.