Abstract:

Abstract

Purpose
This study examines women’s leadership pathways, leadership styles, and organisational impact in Algerian family-owned businesses. It explores how legitimacy is constructed and negotiated within embedded family firm contexts.

Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts a qualitative design based on semi-structured interviews with ten women leaders in Algerian family-owned businesses. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, drawing on gender role congruity theory and the family embeddedness perspective as sensitising frameworks.

Findings
The findings reveal that leadership pathways are shaped by informal kinship-based processes that simultaneously enable access and impose socio-cultural constraints, creating a familial legitimacy paradox. Women leaders engage in situational style-switching between collaborative, democratic and directive approaches as a form of legitimacy work to navigate gendered expectations. Organisational outcomes, including improved employee engagement and service quality, contribute to performance-based legitimacy that reinforces and stabilises women’s authority.

Originality/value
This research advances entrepreneurship, leadership and family business scholarship by shifting attention from access to leadership towards the dynamic processes through which legitimacy is constructed and sustained in embedded organisational contexts, particularly within an under-researched Algerian/ North African setting.

Keywords
Entrepreneurship, Women’s leadership; Family business; Algeria; Gender role congruity; Family embeddedness; Legitimacy.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Entrepreneurship

Keywords: Entrepreneurship Theories;International entrepreneurship;Female entrepreneurs;Entrepreneurship in emerging markets

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Dr. Imani Kyaruzi

Biography