The Mechanism and the Direction of Organisational Culture’s Impact on Corporate Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The paper analyses the mechanism, that is, the way in which organisational culture impacts corporate entrepreneurship. Additionally, the paper analyses the direction of this impact, that is, the assumptions, values, and norms through which culture creates a positive context for corporate entrepreneurship. Corporate entrepreneurship, broadly defined as entrepreneurship within organisations, becomes a prerequisite for the organisations’ survival and development in the era of globalisation, and radical technology and market changes. Organisational culture as a system of assumptions, values, and norms shared by employees and managers significantly determines their opinions and behaviour. The paper demonstrates that organisational culture impacts corporate entrepreneurship by shaping the employees and managers’ interpretative schemes through its assumptions and values. Thus, organisational culture impacts employees and managers’ behaviour in everyday work, and thereby the extent to which this behaviour will be entrepreneurial. We applied the fragmented and integrated approaches in identifying the cultural assumptions, values, and norms through which organisational culture positively impacts corporate entrepreneurship. The fragmented approach showed that organisational culture positively impacts corporate entrepreneurship if it highly values innovations and changes, people development, open and intensive interactions and communications, the autonomy of employees and loose control, identification with the company, focus on work, and openness towards the environment. The integrated approach showed that the following culture types positively impact corporate entrepreneurship: adhocracy culture in Quinn and Cameron’s classification, and constructive culture in Human Synergetics’ classification.