Another Post‐heroic View on Entrepreneurship: The Role of Employees in Networking the Start‐up Process

Abstract Moving beyond the present post‐heroic perspective known from leadership and entrepreneurship research that emphasizes the importance of external context, we shift the focus from the entrepreneurial luminary and his or her core team to the entrepreneurial firm as an organization with employees. This organizational view captures the vital role of employees, in particular for deepening the external relationships of the firm. Towards this end, the authors investigate how three antecedents increase the organizational innovativeness of start‐ups: (i) the external relationships of the start‐up; (ii) the initiation and maintenance of such relationships through networking by entrepreneurs and employees; and (iii) the differentiation of hierarchical levels in this process. A survey‐based study drawing from the data of 96 entrepreneurs and 228 employees in start‐ups is conducted. To analyse the data, the authors tested the conditional indirect effects through a multilevel moderated mediation analysis. According to the results, interorganizational relationships (IORs) are particularly effective for entrepreneurial innovativeness if networking practices are pursued at the employee level. The collective involvement of employees in fact has a mediation effect compared with the individual efforts developed by the entrepreneur. These findings advance the post‐heroic perspective by emphasizing the distinctive role of employees in the utilization of IORs.