Entrepreneurially oriented employees and firm performance: mediating effects

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) with a focus on the interplay between the individual and firm level for embedding EO pervasively within organisations. Design/methodology/approach Comprising 356 individual employees from five companies collected from June to September 2015, this investigation uses structural equation modelling. Findings The results show significant indirect effects from individuals’ EO on firm’s performance, mediated by both individuals’ performance and firm’s EO. Research limitations/implications While the construct of EO is strengthened with a multi-level approach, the authors also stress the organisational homogeneity of EO. Practical implications Consequently, the EO instrument can be used as a strategic tool to evaluate an individual’s orientation towards entrepreneurship to facilitate firm performance. Originality/value Finally, the EO instrument can be used as a strategic tool to evaluate an individual’s orientation towards entrepreneurship to facilitate firm performance.

Entrepreneurial Orientation and Venture Creation in Nigerian Context: Assessing Mediating and Moderating Roles of Self-Efficacy and Entrepreneurial Support among Graduates

“…Some schools of thought argue for the organizational level [68,[73][74][75][76][77]; others contemplate the individual level [6,78]. Therefore, Cho and Lee [47], Dai et al [79] and Fellnhofer [80] mediated with suggestions that the first three dimensions, i.e., innovativeness, risk taking and proactiveness, have been widely applied to explain phenomena under individual-level entrepreneurial orientation (ILEO), in addition to the construct's unidimensional and multidimensional advantage of interacting with a wide range of variables [7,46,65,66,75,78]. For instance, Caseiro and Coelho [81] attested to its multidimensional role to understand the factor's impact in relation to other variables.…”

Does entrepreneurs’ improvisational behavior improve firm performance in time of crisis?

“…From the theoretical perspective, the logic to support why the improvisational behavior of entrepreneurs determines firm performance can be explained by the RBV of firms (Wernerfelt, 1984;Barney and Arikan, 2001). RBV emphasizes the role of critical resources that firms acquire, develop and use to generate capabilities that can help them outperform their competitors (Liu, 2017;Fellnhofer, 2019;Charoensukmongkol, 2020). Critical resources required to achieve this objective need to be valuable, rare, inimitable and impossible to be substituted (Barney, 1991).…”

Entrepreneurial Orientation and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises’ Performance; Does ‘Access to Finance’ Moderate the Relation in Emerging Economies?

“…EO is most widely used as an organizational intangible resource to assess firm’s entrepreneurial capabilities (Miller, 1983), while the researchers mostly use it as a scale to measure the organizational inclination to entrepreneurship (Lages et al, 2017; Rauch et al, 2009), in addition, it is a very crucial factor for organization profit maximization (Anderson & Eshima, 2013). Hence, in previous studies (Doshmanli et al, 2018; Fellnhofer, 2019), the organizational backgrounds and performance (financial and non-financial) related to EO have been broadly underlined, theoretically and empirically, whereas EO and firm performance relationship is currently lacking (Gupta & Barua, 2018; Zhai et al, 2018).…”