An exploratory study of corporate entrepreneurship in latin america Academic Article in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © 2020 Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All rights reserved.Generating new products, services, or technologies may require drawing on available entrepreneurial human resources within the firm. Allowing an organizational climate in which employees engage as internal entrepreneurs can serve as a conduit for in-house generation of innovations. In order to sustain such innovative activity within a firm, corporate entrepreneurship integrates intentional and visible organizational conducts to engage employees in entrepreneurial behaviours that allow for revitalization and strategic renewal. In an understanding that an organizational climate influences employees behaviors, studies have found that certain organizational dimensions can increase employees' perceptions of organizational support that elicit their willingness to pursue entrepreneurial initiatives. In emerging and developing economies prevails a disparity on the capacity of firms to create an organizational climate that taps into the entrepreneurial behaviors of employees. In Latin America, even though many companies develop some type of innovation, the innovative performance of many firms lags significantly behind that of developed economies. The aim of this paper is to assess the perception of employees on five key dimensions in ten Latin American firms located in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Honduras from five different industries. To this end, the Corporate Entrepreneurship Climate Instrument (CECI) was applied to assess (1) top management support, (2) employee autonomy, (3) rewards/reinforcement, (4) time availability, and (5) organizational boundaries. Results from multivariate analysis show that the role of top managers within the company appears as one of the main inhibitors to entrepreneurial behaviour, highlighting the need for improving top management's sensitivity to supporting entrepreneurial activity of employees. Findings also reveal that employees perceive a weakness of organizational resources and incentives to entrepreneurial behavior. The practical implication of this exploratory study is that as long as traditional managerial conducts are not transformed, entrepreneurial individuals will not flourish in detriment of higher innovative organizational performance.

publication date

  • January 1, 2020