Date of Award

Spring 6-12-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in Business

Organizational Unit

Daniels College of Business

First Advisor

Daniel Baack

Second Advisor

Paul Olk

Third Advisor

Dennis Wittmer

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Founder imprinting, Leadership imprinting, Organizational resilience, Small- and medium-sized enterprises, Veteran entrepreneurship, Veteran leadership

Abstract

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face increasing exposure to market volatility, supply disruptions, and rapid environmental change, yet limited empirical work examines how senior leadership backgrounds shape organizational resilience (OR) at the firm level. In this dissertation, I examined whether Veteran Leadership Imprint (VLI), operationalized as a continuous measure of routinized leadership practices associated with military-derived training and experience, is associated with OR in U.S. SMEs (≥ 5 and < 500 employees), and whether environmental turbulence (ET) moderates that relationship.

I employed a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design, collecting primary data via Qualtrics from a structured comparison sample of U.S. SMEs. The final analytic sample comprised 156 usable responses, including 51 veteran-led and 105 nonveteran- led firms. I tested hypotheses using hierarchical ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with heteroskedasticity-consistent robust standard errors (HC3) within the veteran-led subsample. All scales demonstrated acceptable to excellent internal consistency (α = .792–.936).

Results supported Hypothesis 1: VLI was positively and significantly associated with OR (B = 0.243, p = .001), contributing meaningful incremental variance beyond organizational culture and firm age (ΔR2 = .042, Cohen’s f2 = 0.165). Bootstrap confidence intervals confirmed the robustness of this association (95% CI [0.081, 0.387]). Hypothesis 2 was not supported: the VLI × ET interaction did not reach statistical significance (B = 0.021, p = .825).

This dissertation contributes to scholarship on leadership and resilience in four ways. First, it specifies a meso-level imprinting mechanism, grounded in the Experience–Embedding–Enactment–Outcome (E–E–E–O) process model, that explains how formative military experiences become encoded in organizational practices and produce resilience capacity. Second, it bridges individual veteran experience and firm-level organizational capability by treating VLI as a meso-level construct, connecting the micro-level literature on individual leadership imprints with the macro-level literature on organizational founding imprints. Third, it operationalizes VLI as a continuous, practice-based measure that captures gradations of embedded leadership routines rather than collapsing variation into a binary veteran/non-veteran indicator. Fourth, the null moderation result for environmental turbulence constitutes theoretically informative evidence that VLI functions as a generalizable adaptive capability rather than a situationally contingent tactic, supporting the durability of imprinted routines across environmental conditions.

Copyright Date

6-2026

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Trevor C. Nolan

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

139 pgs

File Size

952 KB

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Available for download on Saturday, January 09, 2027



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