This study investigates how leadership shapes intrapreneurship and innovation in Pakistani start-ups. Drawing on upper echelons theory (UET), it explores how founders' values and leadership practices appear to shape employee-driven innovation in a resource-constrained and culturally distinctive context.
A qualitative multiple-case study was conducted across ten start-ups operating in diverse industries. Data were collected through 30 semi-structured interviews with founders and employees and analyzed using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis, supported by NVivo.
Four leadership behaviors emerged as key enablers of intrapreneurship and innovation: (1) benevolent paternalism that cultivates trust and psychological safety, (2) symbolic reduction of hierarchy through open communication and empowerment, (3) a collective orientation that frames innovation as a shared mission and (4) a frugal innovation mindset that reframes resource constraints as opportunities. These practices shape organizational conditions, including psychological safety, voice legitimacy, collective identity, and resource reinterpretation, thereby encouraging employees to initiate and develop intrapreneurial ideas despite contextual constraints.
The findings offer actionable insights for start-up founders, incubators, and policymakers seeking to strengthen entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging economies by fostering leadership practices that promote trust, empowerment and resourceful innovation.
This study extends UET to early-stage ventures in an emerging economy, demonstrating how culturally embedded leadership practices translate founder values into employee intrapreneurial behavior and innovation under scarcity. By linking leadership behaviors to organizational conditions that enable intrapreneurship, the study contributes to leadership and innovation research in resource-constrained contexts.
H. ur Rehman, D. Lewicka· South Asian Journal of Busin...· 0 citations
Transportation services play a key role in the operation of the modern economy, but their environmental impacts are also becoming more and more challenging to reconcile with the global decarbonization targets. This paper investigates the trends in the economic growth-carbon emissions relationship from two complementary angles: the conventional Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) and a transport-adjusted EKC that separates the moderating effect of the transport sector’s competitiveness. The Westerlund (2007) cointegration test is conducted on 121 countries categorized regionally based on their emissions data, in the panel between 2014 and 2024, and the results validate the existence of a stable long-run relationship in each panel. We use Driscoll-Kraay estimation as the main methodology, and panel quantile regression (PQR) as a robustness check to account for possible cross-sectional dependence and distributional heterogeneity. We find significant regional variation, with the traditional inverted-U relationship between growth and emissions for Africa and the Americas, and the turning points already surmounted by higher-income economies, but a positive growth-emissions relationship throughout for European countries, a reflection, we show, of the omission of the transport channel. The transport-adjusted model corrects this by showing the same inverted-U pattern for Africa, the Americas and Asia and Pacific at broadly similar turning points as the baseline model but showing that the turning point for transport-sector emissions in Europe is not observed, even at the highest incomes. This comparison shows that a region’s total emissions curve can conceal a long-term mismatch between growth and decarbonization rates, particularly in transport, and that transport-sector decoupling lags behind the economy’s apparent progress in advanced economies.
Muhammad Javeed Akhter, N. Asghar, H. ur Rehman et al.· International Journal of Bus...· 0 citations
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