While 30 years of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) research has demonstrated that EO provides critical insights into questions of organizational-level strategy and performance, how EO manifests inside organizations has received little attention. Instead of assuming that EO is homogenous, we examine the questions of how and why EO might pervade organizations heterogeneously along three dimensions: vertically across hierarchy levels, horizontally across business units, and temporally as an organization develops. We then present three models for how EO can dynamically pervade organizations and discuss how examining the pervasiveness of EO can further our understanding of entrepreneurship as an organizational phenomenon.
Research Summary: An original and clarifying conceptualization of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is advanced based upon three fundamental ways in which entrepreneurship can be manifest as an organizational attribute: as top management style, organizational configuration, and new entry initiatives. We leverage this conceptualization to examine the presumed state of irreconcilable differences between the Miller (1983)/Covin and Slevin (1989) and Lumpkin and Dess (1996) conceptualizations of EO. This research proposes that these conceptualizations are reconcilable when the problem is reframed to consider how EO is manifest as an organizational attribute at and across multiple levels of analysis. Like the blind men and the elephant, these works have drawn attention to different aspects of a broader phenomenon. How EO as a multifaceted organizational attribute shapes future scholarly dialogue is discussed.
How do managers and staff react to strategic entrepreneurship? How can we minimize resulting job stress and maximize employee retention? We surveyed 1,975 managers and staff in 110 departments of a diversified healthcare organization on department-level entrepreneurial orientation (EO) (e.g., risk taking, proactiveness, and innovativeness), degree of role ambiguity in their job, and their strength of intention to quit. After validating manager and staff reports of EO, we estimated structural equation models for managers and staff. Our results demonstrate that strategic entrepreneurship can impact management and staff differently and thus requires a correspondingly customized design philosophy.
To strengthen the theoretical foundations of incentive system design for corporate entrepreneurship, we develop a moderated model of new venture participation, integrating financial, risk, and effort factors to more comprehensively understand the limits of economic utility maximization theory. We make explicit the trade-offs and opportunity costs for corporate employee-entrepreneurs. We use a conjoint field experiment to collect data on 1952 decisions made by 61 corporate employees to test how risk and effort moderate an employee's decision to participate in a new corporate venture. We find that these factors do interact to affect the choice to engage in corporate entrepreneurship projects.
New ventures are frequently started by entrepreneurial teams rather than lone entrepreneurs. Often, team members have family ties. Yet, there has been relatively little research on new venture and family business teams. The papers in this special issue address this gap by studying team formation and composition, faultlines among team members, generational involvement in teams, the influence of shared organizational experience and functional homogeneity, and the likelihood of couples, biologically related, and unrelated teams achieving first sales. Combined, they suggest that relationships are more important than skill diversity in determining the effectiveness of both family business and new venture teams.
We add novel insights to the debate about why individuals choose to start their own firm by comparing entrepreneurial intentions to the intentions to work at a university as an academic and to be employed in a private firm. To model this more complex set of career choices, we examine novel multiplicative aspects of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and test our hypotheses on survey data of 15,866 students from 13 European countries. Multinomial logistic regression analyses reveal how the different TPB elements influence career preferences and demonstrate the moderating effects of perceived controllability and desirability.
Melanised focal changes (black spots) are common findings in the white skeletal muscle of seawater-farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar). Fillets with melanised focal changes are considered as lower quality and cause large economic losses. It has been suggested that red focal changes (red spots) precede the melanised focal changes. In the present work, we examined different populations of captive and wild salmon for the occurrence of both types of changes, which were investigated for the presence of different viruses by immunohistochemistry and RT-qPCR. The occurrence of red or melanised foci varied significantly between the populations, from none in wild fish control group, low prevalence of small foci in fish kept in in-house tanks, to high prevalence of large foci in farm-raised salmon. Large amounts of Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) antigen were detected in all foci. No other viruses were detected. Red focal changes contained significantly higher levels of PRV RNA than apparently non-affected areas in white muscle of the same individuals. Some changes displayed a transient form between a red and melanised pathotype, indicating a progression from an acute to a chronic manifestation. We conclude that PRV is associated with the focal pathological changes in the white muscle of farmed Atlantic salmon and is a premise for the development of focal melanised changes.
Drawing on the academic entrepreneurship and regulatory focus theory literature, and applying a multilevel perspective, this paper examines why university academics intend to engage in formal (spin‐off or start‐up companies and licensing university research) or informal (collaborative research, contract research, continuous professional development, and contract consulting) commercialization activities and the role local contextual factors, in particular leaders and work‐group colleagues (peers), play in their commercialization choices. Based on a survey of 395 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) academics working in 14 Scottish universities, the research findings suggest that an individual's chronic regulatory focus has a direct effect on their formal and informal commercialization intent. The results reveal that the stronger an individual's chronic promotion focus the stronger their formal and informal commercialization intentions and a stronger individual chronic prevention focus leads to weaker intentions to engage in informal commercialization. In addition, when contextual interaction effects are considered, leaders and workplace colleagues have different influences on commercialization intent. On the one hand, promotion‐focused leaders can strengthen and prevention‐focused leaders can under certain circumstances weaken a promotion‐focused academic's formal commercialization intent. On the other hand, the level of workplace colleague engagement, acting as a reference point, strengthens not only promotion‐focused academics’ intent to engage in formal commercialization activities, but also prevention‐focused academics’ corresponding informal commercialization intent. As such, universities should consider the appointment of leaders who are strong role models and have a track record in formal and/or informal commercialization activities and also consider the importance workplace colleagues have on moderating an academic's intention to engage in different forms of commercialization activities.
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