Strategic leadership and business model innovation: Integrating micro and macro perspectives

Business Model Innovation (BMI) in global contexts is a significant yet insufficiently understood phenomenon. Despite the importance of strategic leadership to BMI, it has received limited attention in existing international management and organization theory literature. Using the theory of dynamic capabilities as an underlying framework, we develop a theoretical, multi-level relationship between strategic leadership, TMT strategic agility and employee flexibility, which are critical managerial/organizational competencies necessary for orchestrating BMI. We conceive of firm-level strategic agility as a combination of TMT strategic agility, comprised of collective commitment and strategic sensitivity at the TMT level, and employee flexibility, comprised of skills flexibility and behavioral flexibility at the employee level. We contribute to advancing literature by addressing the important phenomenon of BMI and by bridging the micro-macro divide. We highlight our contributions, discuss limitations of our theoretical model, and conclude the paper with both academic and practical implications followed by future research directions.