Because of its positive impact on organizational growth and innovation, intrapreneurship has attracted interest in recent times. While its positive impact on organizations benefitted from extensive research over the last years, research on the willingness of employees to adopt intrapreneurial behavior remains low. This paper therefore aims to evaluate the attitudes of employees towards intrapreneurial behavior at work and what kind of working environments are suitable to encourage such behavior. Thereby, the potential risk related to such behavior is placed in the wider risk literature and then critically analyzed. The paper provides a theoretical background on intrapreneurship evincing the development of terms and definitions and identifying relevant authors in this research area. Based on previous research, the analysis of data provides new insights on employees' willingness to adopt intrapreneurial behavior and what working environments might be appropriate to support such behavior and enriches and deepens the understanding of these aspects. The findings show most respondents tended to aspire to intrapreneurial behavior and felt positively motivated towards shaping the organization's future. However, the related working environments are not always suitable and supportive for intrapreneurial behavior. Future research and the collection of further data could further enhance the understanding of employees' behavior and motivation related to intrapreneurship and a distinction of employees' and employers' thoughts might help to gain new knowledge in this field.
Intrapreneurship became a research topic of wide academic interest in recent times. The related subjects studied include its positive impact on organizations, the required working environments and external conditions as well as its impact on employees' behavior, motivation, etc. However, research on the potential barriers and risks related to intrapreneurship remains low. As recent studies tend to focus on single influence factors, there might also be a lack of systematic approaches to study the phenomena, acknowledging the variety of interdependent variables. This paper therefore suggests a systems theory-based approach to assess possible barriers of intrapreneurship in organizations under consideration of risk, systems and organizational behavior. After an outline of previous work on intrapreneurship in general and possible related threads and risk specifically, the sensitivity analysis method of Vester (2000) is adapted to develop a draft model of interconnected influence factors for intrapreneurial activities in organizations. This conceptual model should serve as a basis for further empirical research on the subject and supports the understanding of interdependencies between variables in an organisational system. The application of the model in a single-case study suggests that the influence factors 1) market situation, 2) attitude of employees, 3) skills and creativity, 4) values and goals of the organization, 5) working environment, 6) agility and rule breaking tolerance, 7) managerial processes or management support, 8) communication processes, 9) knowledge and 10) intangible assets could have a high impact on intrapreneurial activities. Future research could make use of this approach and empirically validate the conceptual model. It could be further enhanced through semantic modelling to illustrate the network of interdependencies.
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