How the Leader-Team Age Dissimilarity and Leader Power Shape the Entrepreneurial Ventures’ R&D Intensity: Empirical Evidence from China

Abstract Contemplating the directionality of age difference between the leaders and their team, the leader-team age dissimilarity can be divided into two categories: leader-team norm-consistent age dissimilarity and leader-team norm-inconsistent age dissimilarity. Previous studies have remained lacking to investigate these two types of age differences and their interactions relationship with leaders’ power under China’s cultural context. This study integrates the theoretical framework of social normative theory and power distance theory, and analyzes the impact of leader-team norm-consistent age dissimilarity and leader-team norm-inconsistent age dissimilarity, and their interaction with leader power on entrepreneurial firms’ research and development (R&D) intensity. Panel data on the entrepreneurial firms of the China’s Growth Enterprise Market is adopted, and panel random-effects tobit regression is used for empirical test. The results indicate that leader-team norm-consistent age dissimilarity is negatively associated with R&D intensity of entrepreneurial firms, whereas there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between leader-team norm-inconsistent age dissimilarity and entrepreneurial firms’ R&D intensity. The aforementioned relationship is stronger when leader power is high as opposed to when it is low. The execution of robustness checks authenticates the veracity of the empirical results.