Antecedents and Outcomes of Entrepreneurial and Market Orientations in a Non-profit Context: Theoretical and Empirical Insights

Abstract

While heavily emphasized within for-profit organizations, little is understood regarding the role of entrepreneurial leadership in the development, growth, and sustainability of non-profit enterprises. The fundamental logic of entrepreneurship is less apparent in this context given the social mission and multiple stakeholders involved. Building on findings regarding entrepreneurial orientation (EO) within for-profit organizations, a model of antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of entrepreneurship in non-profits is developed and tested. Emphasis is placed on the relationship between EO and the market orientation (MO) of the non-profit. The findings demonstrate that entrepreneurship has a legitimate role in non-profits, and the work climate can be designed to affect levels of entrepreneurship. Further, EO is associated with aspects of market orientation, but not with financial performance. Implications are drawn for theory and practice.

Entrepreneurial Orientation Theory and Research: Reflections on a Needed Construct

“…First, with regard to the matter of EO's conceptual ambiguity, there are two principal ways in which EO has been conceptualized in past research: the composite dimension approach most closely associated with Miller's (1983) and Covin and Slevin's (1989) work, and the multidimensional approach most commonly associated with Lumpkin and Dess's (1996) work. Over the years, a substantial body of research has critiqued and compared the two conceptualizations of EO (see for example, Basso et al, 2009;George, 2011;Kreiser, Marino, & Weaver, 2002;Morris, Coombes, & Schindehutte, 2007), often with the objective of identifying the more defensible of the two approaches. However, these two conceptualizations of EO are fundamentally different and neither is inherently superior to the other.…”

The Impact of Strategic Entrepreneurship inside the Organization: Examining Job Stress and Employee Retention

“…Fourth, given the potential societal benefits of new products, services, and value propositions in healthcare, more research into strategic entrepreneurship and healthcare can have globespanning implications (compare, for example, Schendel & Hitt, 2007). For these reasons, and for others outlined in related research on entrepreneurship in not-for-profit and mission-driven organizations (Morris, Coombes, Schindehutte, & Allen, 2007), we claim that healthcare systems are an excellent setting to simulate a wide range of hightechnology and service-oriented organizations and to examine broader questions of strategic entrepreneurship in these dynamic contexts.…”

Understanding the Manifestation of Entrepreneurial Orientation in the Nonprofit Context

“…Without adapting the EO scale, researchers fail to capture the specific forms of entrepreneurship within each context, providing only a partial assessment of their study's phenomena. Nonprofit organizations represent a particular context characterized by significant differences from the traditional entrepreneurship form of for-profit organizations, and at the same time, a focus of recent EO research (e.g., Morris, Berthon, Pitt, Murgolo-Poore, & Ramshaw, 2001;Morris, Coombes, Schindehutte, & Allen, 2007;Morris & Joyce, 1998;Pearce, Fritz, & Davis, 2010). Nonprofit organizations are self-governed entities formed with the purpose of filling a societal need, and given their nonprofit status, they do not distribute revenues as profits (Boris & Steuerle, 2006).…”