Leadership styles, entrepreneurial orientation, and organizational performance in accounting firms: Evidence of parallel mediation in an emerging economy

Purpose This study examines whether entrepreneurial orientation (EO) transmits the association between leadership and perceived organizational performance in Brazilian accounting firms, and whether the two dimensions of perceived organizational EO that emerge in this setting, proactiveness-innovativeness and risk-taking, operate as distinct transmission routes. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 184 employees of collective-liability accounting organizations registered with the Regional Accounting Council of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Leadership, EO, and performance were measured through established instruments whose structure was examined by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, with validation on an independent sample still necessary. The structural model was estimated as a parallel mediation with bias-corrected and accelerated bootstrap confidence intervals. Findings Transformational and transactional leadership could not be empirically separated, so the leadership predictor is an active-constructive factor merging both, whose separate contributions remain untested and which is positively associated with perceived organizational performance and with both EO dimensions. Proactiveness-innovativeness and risk-taking are each positively associated with perceived organizational performance and together transmit roughly two-thirds of the total leadership association. The two routes do not differ significantly from one another, and a direct association of leadership with performance persists beyond EO. Passive-avoidant leadership forms a coherent factor but adds nothing to performance once active-constructive leadership is accounted for. Originality/value The study specifies which component of entrepreneurial orientation carries the leadership association rather than treating EO as a single conduit, and it does so in a professional service context where a professionalized workforce and mandatory regulatory compliance narrow the levers available to managers. The failure of transformational and transactional leadership to separate empirically in this setting is read as a result consistent with the possibility that the Full Range model compresses in compliance-dense professional settings, an interpretation that one sector and one regional sample leave open to test.