Authors: Anshu Kumar Mishra, Sohail Verma
Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between leadership styles and team performance in startup organisations, using survey-based data collected from 120 respondents comprising founders, co-founders, team leads and early-stage employees across multiple sectors. The study identifies transformational leadership as the dominant style in the sample and finds strong positive associations between vision-driven leadership, team trust, communication frequency and performance outcomes. Transactional leadership shows moderate relevance in goal-setting and accountability, while laissez-faire approaches correlate with lower performance consistency. Exploratory chi-square testing reveals significant concentration in leadership style distribution, a meaningful link between startup stage and performance rating, and a strong association between trust levels and team output. The paper concludes that startup performance is not driven by a single leadership template but by the leader's ability to adapt style to team maturity, organisational stage and the demands of rapid growth. A hybrid leadership model combining transformational inspiration with transactional clarity emerges as the most effective pattern for high-performing startup teams.
