Driving Forces of Employees’ Entrepreneurial Intentions - Leadership Style and Organizational Structure

Abstract

Research Question: The purpose of this paper is to explore how leadership style and organizational structure characteristics influence employees’ intentions to start their own entrepreneurial ventures, ideas or projects, within an organizational setting. Motivation: The main goal is to learn how to prevent innovativeness declining in a traditional organization and make internal environment friendly for entrepreneurial initiatives and for employees with propensity to develop new ideas, aiming to create sustainable competitive position. Idea: The paper explores how identified leadership variables, initiative, pioneer, proactive behaviour and ability to communicate vision affect employees’ entrepreneurial intentions. We also analyze the organizational structure impact, testing organic design, level of centralization and formalization. For measuring employees’ entrepreneurial intentions, we use a previously validated scale and measurements, innovation, risk propensity and autonomy. Data: The data are collected using a questionnaire on a random sample of 208 respondents employed in nineteen Serbian companies. Tools: A quantitative study methodology was designed and implemented, appropriate statistical methods performed, including correlation and linear regression analyses. Findings: We have found evidence that appropriate leadership style has a positive influence on employees' entrepreneurial intentions. More specifically, there is a positive correlation between the leader’s initiative, pioneer and proactive behaviour, and the employees’ intentions to start innovative entrepreneurial ventures. The employees’ willingness to act autonomously is affected by leader’s initiative and proactive attitude, but also by ability to clearly communicate the vision. The study also reveals that organic organizational structure, decentralization and low formalization have a positive influence on employees' entrepreneurial intentions. Contribution: The study contributes to a significant degree by filling gaps in knowledge base, revealing new perspectives about relevance of both leadership style and organizational structure for encouraging organizational entrepreneurship. The analysis also provides a more fine-grained perspective about characteristics of organizational design and improves understanding of the employees’ actions depending on authority delegation, procedures and overall flexibility of organizational structure. Practical implications represent guidelines for practitioners as to how to set up structure and adjust leadership style in order to foster entrepreneurship among employees.

Influencing Factors on Knowledge Management for Organizational Sustainability

“…Additionally, it is concluded that organizational culture is responsible for the viability and development of organizations [9,20,44]. Existing research coincides with the conclusions that knowledge has to be present in all parts of the system as well as that an organic organizational structure, decentralization, and low formalization have positive effects on employee intentions [46].…”

“…Knowledge has to be present in all parts of the system. [46]. Knowledge transfer is at a low level of efficiency among project team members in the Serbian banking sector.…”

Relationship between faculty characteristics and their entrepreneurial orientation in higher education institutions in Kuwait

“…A large stream of literature studied the determinants of employee entrepreneurial orientation. Organizational variables were advocated such as management support (Mustafa et al, 2018 ; Sebora & Theerapatvong, 2010 ; ul Haq et al, 2018 ), job design (Mustafa et al, 2018 ), job autonomy (De Jong et al, 2015 ), proactive and pioneering leadership, decentralized and organic organizational structure (Nielsen et al, 2019 ), procedural justice and distributive justice (ul Haq et al, 2018 ). A more comprehensive study grouped those determinants into three categories: personal characteristics, job characteristics, and contextual characteristics (Kamil & Nasurdin, 2016 ).…”

Do Individual Factors Affect the Relationship between Faculty Intrapreneurship and the Entrepreneurial Orientation of Their Organizations?

“…Indeed, individual intrapreneurship identifies and exploits market opportunities that allow the organization to reinvent its offerings and strengthen its competitiveness (Neessen et al 2019). Employees' entrepreneurial activities flourish when they operate in an organic and flexible organizational structure (Nielsen et al 2019). Previous studies show that employee intrapreneurship is influenced by a myriad of factors such as managerial support (Lizote et al 2014;ul Haq et al 2018), engaging leadership (Nielsen et al 2019), job design (Mustafa et al 2018), and organizational justice (ul Haq et al 2018).…”

“…Employees' entrepreneurial activities flourish when they operate in an organic and flexible organizational structure (Nielsen et al 2019). Previous studies show that employee intrapreneurship is influenced by a myriad of factors such as managerial support (Lizote et al 2014;ul Haq et al 2018), engaging leadership (Nielsen et al 2019), job design (Mustafa et al 2018), and organizational justice (ul Haq et al 2018). Ahmed et al (2020) posit that employees' engagement and their contribution to the business performance will be enhanced when an organization provides proper treatment to employees through management support, sufficient time to accomplish the work duties, the autonomy to work at the manager's own discretion, clear organizational boundaries, and a reward system for creativity and innovation.…”