Profiling intrapreneurs to develop management interventions: Evidence from Sri Lanka

Intrapreneurship, defined as the entrepreneurial behaviour of employees in established firms, has received growing research and practitioner attention. Despite increased efforts to develop and promote intrapreneurial behaviour, little is known about characteristics differentiating high intrapreneurs from low intrapreneurs. This research attempts to understand if and how intrapreneurs differ based on their demographic characteristics. Using intrapreneurship data collected from 329 middle level employees from Sri Lanka, we first carried out K- mean cluster analysis. The results suggest that the respondents belong to two significantly different (p = 0.000) clusters. Around 65% of our respondents belong to high intrapreneurship cluster while the remainder belong to low intrapreneurship cluster. We then carried cross tabulation analysis to derive demographic profiles for each cluster based on age, years of experience, industry, educational qualifications, and gender. The standardized residuals revealed that females are significantly higher (than expected frequency) in low intrapreneurship cluster and significantly lower in high intrapreneurship cluster. Overall, gender reveals to be a significant differentiator between intrapreneurship clusters. Our findings contribute to theory by providing novel insights on demographic profiles related to intrapreneurship. From practitioners’ perspective, it suggests that management interventions promoting intrapreneurial behaviour in organisations should specifically target females

Individual performance: Do we measure it accurately?

Despite increasing efforts to accurately measure individual work performance (IWP), performance measures have payed limited attention to the relative importance (RI) of each performance dimension on respective employees’ performance. In our attempt to test if including RI better captures IWP, we adopted a quantitative study. We collected performance data of 329 Sri Lankan middle level employees from respective supervisors. Using structural equation modelling, we found that both performance items alone and performance dimensions with RI methods are valid and reliable, yet the latter has significantly higher levels of model fit compared to the former. Thus, including RI of each performance dimension better captures IWP than performance dimensions alone. Our paper contributes to theory and provides useful insights to practice