To improve school organisational performance and innovativeness, and meet diverse student needs, school leaders should be innovative/creative pioneers, risk-takers, and proactive, thus applying entrepreneurial practices/strategies and market mechanisms (Brauckmann-Sajkiewicz & Pashiardis, 2022; Eyal & Kark, 2004; Pihie et al., 2014). This study investigated, from a schoolteacher’s perspective, the degree of entrepreneurial leadership behaviour (ELB) applied by school principals in European primary schools. Given that school autonomy is an important predictor of leaders’ entrepreneurship (Eyal & Kark, 2004); this study investigates the impact of educational macro (autonomy and accountability) and micro (demographics) contexts on ELB by comparing centralised and decentralised European school systems with the highly centralised Greek school system. This comparative study was conducted in Greece (630 participants) and in 14 European countries (972 participants). Thornberry’s (2006) Entrepreneurial Leadership Questionnaire was used, comprising general entrepreneurial leader, miner, accelerator, explorer, and integrator behaviours. The results revealed that ELB is a multi-dimensional concept, and that participating teachers perceive ELB application moderately, with more focus on the internal (than external) school environment. Furthermore, the dual-directional macro-contextual influence found in applying ELB indicates that high school autonomy and accountability activate ELB owing to the school’s freedom to engage in entrepreneurial ventures, while low autonomy/accountability still activates ELB, but only for organisational survival within hierarchical-bureaucratic school environments. This feature differentiates ‘intrapreneur/intrepreneur’ from ‘entrepreneur’ school principals (Hentschke, 2010). The school micro-context was found to influence ELB in European decentralised school systems. However, ELB was not majorly influenced by school-level variables in centralised school systems owing to the uniformity resulting from educational macro- and micro-level centralisation. Our findings suggest optimism regarding the pedagogical added value of applying ELB in schools, thus arising implications for school leadership research and practice.

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