Entrepreneurial Leadership in Times of Fiscal Austerity: a Case Study of the Greek Local Government

Entrepreneurship in local government under conditions of increased fiscal pressure is essential for creatively coping with financial and societal challenges within a complex and dynamic context that demands to achieve more with less. This paper sets out to explore entrepreneurial leadership in the Greek local government that has been recently subject to a radical fiscal austerity policy reform agenda. While entrepreneurial leadership has emerged as critical to enhancing creativity and innovation in the private sector, the concept and functions of entrepreneurial leadership in the public sector rarely have they been explored at organizational level, especially in local government organizations. This paper investigates how entrepreneurial leadership can be enacted within the context of Greek fiscally stressed local government, from an organizational perspective. This research was conducted through a case study involving a Greek local government organization. It draws on data collected through 26 in-depth semi-structured interviews with public servants from top, middle and front-line levels of management, documentary, archival evidence and field notes. An exploratory and inductive approach allowed gathering rich and insightful data on the context and processes of entrepreneurial leadership enactment. The study contributes to entrepreneurship scholarship from methodological perspective because of continued lack of qualitative entrepreneurship scholarship, including case-based research, although entrepreneurship is considered to be directly related to its context. The research findings demonstrate that public servants operating at all levels of the organizational hierarchy have a positive attitude towards entrepreneurship that is manifested though the identification of entrepreneurial opportunities for improving performance and achieving public value outcomes. Moreover, the study finds evidence that entrepreneurial leadership is enacted and distributed internally throughout the organization; however, it is the intervention of local political authorizing environment that challenges the implementation of these opportunities. Moreover, the findings also reveal that the enactment of entrepreneurial leadership converges with requirements for more open and democratic governance, which becomes more complicated under the fiscal austerity conditions. The research findings are original and unique drawing on insights from public entrepreneurship, public value management and public administration literatures. The findings are based on a case study research approach bringing a multi-level perspective from public servants across top, middle and front-line management of the complexity of enactment of entrepreneurial activity in local government within the fiscal austerity context of Greece. This is important for theory because it helps deeper understanding of public entrepreneurship and the conditions of enactment of entrepreneurial leadership in this particular context. The research findings are also useful to policy makers interested in fostering entrepreneurial activity in local government under fiscal austerity conditions.