The current business environment is volatile and complex. Companies must constantly identify creative and environmentally friendly solutions. The emphasis on employees and workforce agility has become an attribute of sustainable and competitive organizations simultaneously. The purpose of our study is to validate the hypothesis that there is a direct positive relationship between ranking as important top position of human resources in a company and the extent to which specific practices to increase workforce agility were adopted. Our survey is based on an original questionnaire, with a 92% response rate. We focused on large, independent decision-making companies from Western Romania, for which the implementation of sustainable principles is more difficult than for multinationals. The statistical analysis was performed using SPSS23 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). The results indicate an average extent of the adoption of management practices aiming to increase workforce agility (45%) and a ranking of human resources in first place as the most important resource (31.7%). Using the Pearson Chi-Square Test, the hypothesis was confirmed (significance = 0.026). Our main conclusion is that if managers intend to develop a sustainable and competitive business, they should attribute a strategic role to employees and adopt practices to increase their agility.

Background: The study adapts the corporate entrepreneurship assessment instrument (CEAI), a notable North American psychometric instrument used to evaluate entrepreneurial culture, and investigates its construct validity scale, taking into account that psychometric instruments have limited cross-cultural portability. Objectives: We aim at identifying the perceived internal management key factors in the Romanian entrepreneurial culture (private sector) and applying CEAI to emergent economies. Method: The corporate entrepreneurship assessment instrument uses a 48-item Likert scale questionnaire to collect information from a large sample of employees working in different companies. The questions, seen as random variables, are then factor analysed in order to get a reduced more manageable structure. Factors are finally interpreted with respect to the entrepreneurial propensity of the business sector in study. The software used for statistical analysis was SPSS. Results: The survey conducted on 175 professionals from Romanian technology-based companies yielded a 10-factor structure for this particular business environment: reinforcement and work discretion, dynamic environment and decreased formalisation, delegation, time availability, strategic awareness, management support, stress, vertical communication, horizontal communication and knowledge sharing. Conclusion: The study provides a thorough understanding of the Romanian post-communist corporate culture, and, together with a similar analysis recently performed in South Africa, aims to create a clearer picture of cross-cultural portability of entrepreneurship psychometric instruments.

Abstract:We have conducted a broad statistical research on Romanian small to medium enterprises (SMEs), with the goal of better understanding: (1) the incipient organizational culture of a recently-opened East European market; and (2) the role of leadership in increasing the competitiveness of SMEs. The paper studies the perceived characteristics of a leader and their influence on the organization's results (as seen by employees), and it tries to reveal the subliminal inter-correlations among these characteristics. The method is factor analysis (implemented in SPSS), for a questionnaire with 23 items, answered by 930 subjects on a five-point Likert scale. The six factors identified by our analysis were: adaptability; cooperation; authority; charisma; confidence; motivation. By highlighting these basic components, our study aims both at increasing competitiveness in Romanian enterprises and at designing better training programs for managers and entrepreneurs acting on East European markets, adapted to the real characteristics of these young economic environments.

This paper aimed at establishing a Corporate Entrepreneurship diagnosis model within public R&D institutions. We based our analysis on empirical identification of a generalized set of organizational factors, perceived as intrapreneurship vectors. The quantitative research targeted 50 experienced public entities and was based on validating one of the most popular psychometric instruments in the entrepreneurial literature: the Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument (CEAI)-originally intended for the North American economic environment. As recent literature questioned the cross-cultural portability of psychometric instruments, this study intended to validate the five-factor intrinsic structure of CEAI. The five factors deduced by our statistical analysis were: support for opportunity investigations and reinforcement; dynamic environment and recognition; decreased formalization; knowledge sharing; time availability and strategic awareness. Next, the factor scores were used as input variables for a logistic regression procedure, with the output variable being the intrapreneurial value of the respondents' institutions. Two factors contribute considerably to the predicted intrapreneurial value: support for opportunity investigations and reinforcement and decreased formalization. The validity of the whole approach is supported by the relevance of the original CEAI questionnaire, able to reveal intrapreneurial characteristics, and by the prediction power of the logistic regression model over the intrapreneurial propensity of public institutions.

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