Transformational Leadership: The Emerging Leadership Style of Successful Entrepreneurs

This research was conducted to identify the emerging leadership style being practiced by successful entrepreneurs and the leadership behavior they frequently applied. Since, leadership style and behavior has a huge influence to the success of the entrepreneur's enterprise. One hundred and fifty (150) successful entrepreneurs was the respondent of this study and they were survey and interviewed about their actual leadership style and practices. The research design was qualitative-descriptive type of research with the use of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire 5X (MLQ 5X) as the survey instrument to collect data regarding leadership styles of successful entrepreneurs. An interview guide questions was likewise utilized for validating the result of the study. An in-depth semi-structured interview was also conducted to 30 entrepreneurs from the 150 respondents. Findings of the study revealed that a successful entrepreneur exhibits a noticeably higher inclination toward transformational leadership and they consistently rated themselves higher in inspirational motivation for their leadership behavior. Therefore, the emerging leadership style of successful entrepreneurs is the transformational leadership and the leadership behavior that they frequently use is the inspirational motivation. Furthermore, the aimed of this study is to explore practices of transformational leadership behavior of successful entrepreneurs from entrepreneur's perspective.