Antecedents Of Entrepreneurial Orientation: Testing The Impact Of Engagement And Extra-role Behaviors

Gailly, Benoît [UCL] Belousova, Olga [RUG, Netherlands] Groen, Aard [RUG, Netherlands]

Research suggests that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) may have a positive impact on the organizational performance (Rauch et al., 2009). It is, therefore, surprising, how little we know about the way EO is formed within organizations (Anderson and Eshima, 2011) and what causes its potential heterogeneity across the business units (Wales et al., 2011), as this knowledge is needed to understand how firms may foster, develop and maintain the desired level of EO. In this paper we investigate whether the heterogeneity of EO manifestations may be linked to the business unit employees’ work engagement and their extra-role voice behaviors. We argue that if a company expects entrepreneurial activities from its employees, the challenge for the management is to instill the personal emotional and cognitive engagement among them. We believe that along with engagement a business unit EO is unthinkable without the possibility of employees to voice their suggestions and improvements. We find partial confirmation for our hypotheses and show that for managers and staff the mechanism works differently.