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A Network Perspective on Corporate Entrepreneurship
How Workplace Relationships Influence Entrepreneurial Behavior
Stefan Breet
Erasmus University Rotterdam · ERIM Ph.D. Series Research in Management 545 · 2022
Organizations often struggle to maintain or rekindle an entrepreneurial spirit, which makes them vulnerable when circumstances change. Corporate entrepreneurship is the process that stimulates entrepreneurial behavior, enabling organizations to respond to changing circumstances, pursue new opportunities, and secure their long-term viability.
Existing models of corporate entrepreneurship have greatly improved our understanding of this process, but they share a blind spot: they do not explicitly acknowledge the social context in which organizations and their employees operate. In this dissertation, I develop and test a theoretical framework that offers a network perspective on corporate entrepreneurship (the NPCE framework). It shows when and why workplace relationships play a decisive role in whether employees behave entrepreneurially.
The results of three empirical studies support the framework and demonstrate that the social context can evoke both entrepreneurial and conservative behavior. The key implication is that leaving the social context out of the analysis produces an incomplete picture of how corporate entrepreneurship really works.
Academic Abstract
Organizations often struggle to maintain or rekindle an entrepreneurial flair, which makes them vulnerable when circumstances change. Corporate entrepreneurship is a process that stimulates entrepreneurial behavior, enabling organizations to respond to changing circumstances, pursue new opportunities, and secure their long-term viability. Prior research has suggested several models that capture the corporate entrepreneurship process and identify a range of factors that stimulate or stifle entrepreneurial behavior. These models greatly improved our understanding of corporate entrepreneurship, but they do not explicitly acknowledge the social context of organizations and employees. In this dissertation, I develop and test a theoretical framework that provides a network perspective on corporate entrepreneurship (the NPCE framework). The NPCE framework shows when and why the social context plays a decisive role in the corporate entrepreneurship process. The results of three empirical studies provide support for the NPCE framework and demonstrate that the social context can evoke entrepreneurial and conservative behavior. The key implication of this finding for future corporate entrepreneurship research is that the omission of the social context leads to an incomplete understanding of the corporate entrepreneurship process.
Reference
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