Employees’ Entrepreneurial Behaviour: The influence of employees’ socio-cognitive traits and country-level institutional context

Abstract

Firm-level entrepreneurship, which is often referred to as corporate entrepreneurship (CE), is a critical strategic choice for firms’ vitality and competitiveness in a global economy (Dess et al. 2003; Kuratko et al. 2015). Over the last five decades, research has focused on CE’s firm-level or individual/group (i.e., top management team (TMT))-level antecedents of CE to determine what factors foster organisations’ entrepreneurial activities (Urbano et al. 2022). Research also establishes that, at the individual level, employees’ entrepreneurial behaviour (EEB) influences an organisation’s entrepreneurial growth and overall performance (Perlines et al. 2022). However, comparatively few studies explore what drives EEB, so research on the individual-level antecedents of EEB remains disparate and scarce (Neessen et al. 2019). This thesis is divided into two stages, the first of which uses a multi-level framework and a meta-analysis to aggregate findings from 102 independent samples obtained from 97 articles published up to 2022. This meta-analysis, the first to assess CE’s antecedents at multiple levels, combines empirical findings on the antecedents of CE across the TMT and firm levels. The cumulative evidence, examined through a meta-regression, shows that a TMT’s entrepreneurial human capital and transformational leadership and its firm’s building blocks, resources, and capabilities are positive drivers of CE. Stage 2 of this thesis focuses on the employee level and answers recent calls to study EEB as a multi-level phenomenon (Schindehutte et al. 2018). Based on the integrative framework of social cognitive theory (SCT) (Bandura 1988) and institutional economics theory (North 1990), this study investigates theoretically the associations among EEB, employees’ socio-cognitive traits and country-level institutional factors using a multi-level logistic regression. A sample of 225,640 employees from 70 countries representing various institutional contexts was created by merging data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) surveys, the Economic Freedom (EF) Index, the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), WorldBank (WB) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The results suggest that employees’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy and opportunity perception, along with supportive managerial attitudes and norms, promote EEB, while fear of failure and rigid employment regulations discourage it. The results also suggest that country-level institutional factors influence the likelihood that employees will mobilise their socio-cognitive resources to pursue high-growth entrepreneurship.