Founder-CEOS’ procedural fairness: How and when it matters to new venture ambidexterity

Abstract

Different from the typical research about procedural fairness that focuses on lower level leaders and its influence on non-managerial teams, we pay particular attention to founder-CEOs’ procedural fairness. To investigate whether and how founder-CEOs’ procedural fairness could help to promote new ventures’ competitiveness, we first link this leadership quality to new ventures’ ambidexterity and propose new venture team members’ advice-seeking behavior as a mediator. We next predict that this indirect benefit is moderated by environmental dynamism, since the association between founder-CEOs’ procedural fairness and new venture teams’ advice-seeking behavior can be lessened when environmental dynamism is not high. Results based on a multi-sourced and time-lagged survey of founder-CEOs and all new venture team members in 92 Chinese new ventures support our predictions. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications.