Fostering an Entrepreneurial Mindset for School Leadership

This cumulative dissertation investigates Entrepreneurial School Leadership (ESL) in the K-12 setting, integrating conceptual, empirical, and contextual perspectives to advance understanding of how school leaders (SLs) foster innovation and systemic school development. ESL is conceptualized as a hybrid, transformative leadership style, whereby SLs recognize challenges, identify opportunities, strategically mobilize resources, and cultivate a culture of professional inquiry, collaboration, and experimentation, while balancing operational, pedagogical, and ethical objectives. A scoping review of 64 international studies highlights both the conceptual richness and fragmentation of ESL research. Core entrepreneurial traits, such as innovation, proactivity, risk-taking, and networking, are consistently emphasized, yet empirical evidence linking these dispositions to school-level outcomes remains limited and contextdependent. Contextual analyses in Austria and Germany further underscore the institutional and cultural contingencies of ESL, revealing that in German-speaking countries policy frameworks increasingly emphasize innovation, change management, and strategic resource use, while requiring alignment with humanistic educational values to avoid tensions between efficiency and pedagogical missions. Quantitative findings demonstrate the significance of entrepreneurial dispositions: self-efficacy strongly predicts leadership identity and indirectly fosters motivation to lead, whereas personal initiative interacts with institutional norms in complex, contextspecific ways. These results indicate that an entrepreneurial mindset is enacted within organizational and cultural conditions that both enable and constrain its effects. On the whole, the findings suggest that ESL enables K-12 leaders to drive transformative innovation simultaneously by fostering opportunity recognition, strategic resource coordination, collaborative problem-solving, and adaptive school development. Effective implementation, however, requires contextual sensitivity and ethical grounding to maintain participatory governance and uphold educational values. The dissertation concludes by emphasizing the need for longitudinal, multilevel, and mixed-method research to capture the systemic embedding of entrepreneurial dispositions and their influence on school innovation and learning outcomes across diverse educational contexts.