Contemplating the actual leaders of entrepreneurial firms and socio demographic dissimilarity between leaders and their teams, this study adopts panel data on the entrepreneurial firms of the China’s Growth Enterprise Market and empirically examines the influence of chair power on research and development intensity of entrepreneurial firms from the perspective of social identity. The results indicate that chair power positively affects entrepreneurial firms’ R&D intensity. The chair–team sociodemographic dissimilarity moderates the relationship in such a way that chair power is negatively (...) related to entrepreneurial firms’ R&D intensity only when chair–team sociodemographic dissimilarity is high. The execution of robustness checks authenticates the veracity of the empirical results. (shrink)