Organizational Aspirations and External Venturing: The Contingency of Entrepreneurial Orientation

Abstract

We contribute to the organizational aspirations and corporate venturing literature by theorizing and testing (a) the influence of a firm’s idiosyncratic strategic posture on behavioral responses to performance attainment discrepancies, and (b) that performance feedback may influence multifaceted yet thematically related forms of search. Specifically, we examine the influence of performance feedback on equity-based external corporate venturing. We then propose that a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is a critical contingency when theorizing about how firms respond to attainment discrepancies. Our findings indicate that a firm’s EO is an important contingency when considering behavioral responses to attainment discrepancies.

Entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance in a sanctioned economy – does the CEO play a role?

“…Regression analysis is still considered useful as well as rigorous, specifically in the field of entrepreneurship. Recent publications in the leading outlets of entrepreneurship are continuously employing regression analysis to test their theory-driven hypotheses about entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance as a robust tool (to name a few: Titus et al, 2020;de Mol et al, 2020;Michaelisa et al, 2020;Duran and Ortiz, 2020;Cacciottia et al, 2020;Anglin et al, 2020). Moreover, the PCA performed over the measurement tools of the three variables of the study reduced the dimensionality, and thus regression analysis could be the most relevant technique in order to test the relationships among unidimensional constructs.…”

Entrepreneurial orientation during adversity: differences across ownership categories

“…Hence, it has been noticed that organizations tend to have a higher EO when things are not going as per plan, and a change is warranted. A lower than aspired performance level is regarded as a problem that initiates search efforts (Cyert and March, 1963; Titus et al , 2019) that trigger more risk-taking, proactiveness and innovative behaviour. In this way, this study highlights the dynamic nature of EO.…”

“…As argued by Wales (2016): “[F]actors which explain the organizational genesis or sustenance of EO remain an important area of research” (p. 9). Despite its scope, there is little research on the impact of performance feedback on EO (Titus et al , 2020). This is surprising because negative performance feedback or a lower performance relative to an aspiration level (Wennberg and Holmquist, 2008; Hsieh et al , 2015), according to the behavioral agency theory (BAT) (Wiseman and Gómez-Mejía, 1998; Pepper and Gore, 2015), can lead to risk-seeking strategic activities (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Tversky and Kahneman, 1992).…”

A bibliometric analysis of entrepreneurial orientation

“…Since the publication of Miller’s (1983) seminal work on entrepreneurial orientation (EO), the topic has become one of the most active topics in the field of entrepreneurship. In recent years, this topic has increasingly shifted from its traditional strategic management and organizational domains to work in the areas of, for example, international performance (Chen et al , 2020; Martin and Javalgi, 2016), environmental sciences ecology (Jiang et al , 2018a; Jansson et al , 2017), behavioral theory (Santos et al , 2016; Titus et al , 2020; Zhang et al , 2019) and resource acquisition (Jiang et al , 2018b; Yin et al , 2020). As EO research has proliferated, we have also witnessed discussion around special issues such as family business (Miller et al , 2016; Boling et al , 2016; Fu and Si, 2018), individual EO (Covin et al , 2020; Santos et al , 2020; Lee et al , 2011) and organizational learning (Altinay et al , 2016; Sheng and Chien, 2016).…”