Critical factors for innovative work behaviour in Latin American firms: test of an exploratory model

The aim of this study is to examine how transformational and transactional leaders, boost the employees? innovative work behaviour, directly or through work engagement, organizational climate for innovation and absorptive capacity in Latin American firms. A non-random sample of 1429 employees was used who had been working at least one year in the current company. The sample, composed of workers from different industries, was collected in postgraduate programs of business schools from seven Latin American countries. A multi-group structural equation model was built with the involved variables, which adopted two different conditions: i.e., unconstrained and constrained questionnaire measurement weights. According to the results, leadership by itself is insufficient to promote employees innovative work behaviour. Transformational and transactional leadership exert effect on this behaviour only through absorptive capacity and work engagement respectively. Likewise, absorptive capacity and employee work engagement show direct effects on innovative work behaviour. Additionally, organizational climate for innovation shows a significant moderating effect on the all relationships included in the model. Despite the cultural differences, the two-condition model yielded the same effect in each country, which indicates the validity of a general model of innovative work behaviour for the whole region supporting the common identity of this region. As a conclusion, leadership practices are needed to encourage innovative work behaviour within the Latin American organizational context, however some individual (engagement) and organizational (absorptive capacity) conditions are also needed to ensure this effect. Implications for human resources management are discussed

Act or wait-and-see? Adversity, agility, and entrepreneur wellbeing across countries during the Covid-19 pandemic

How can entrepreneurs protect their wellbeing during a crisis? Does engaging agility (namely, opportunity agility and planning agility) in response to adversity help entrepreneurs safeguard their wellbeing? Activated by adversity, agility may function as a specific resilience mechanism enabling positive adaption to crisis. We studied 3,162 entrepreneurs from 20 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic and found that more severe national lockdowns enhanced firm-level adversity for entrepreneurs and diminished their wellbeing. Moreover, entrepreneurs who combined opportunity agility with planning agility experienced higher wellbeing but planning agility alone lowered wellbeing. Entrepreneur agility offers a new agentic perspective to research on entrepreneur wellbeing

O Ensino de Empreendedorismo com Fundamento na Teoria Effectuation

Resumo Em função da baixa consolidação das metodologias de ensino voltadas ao empreendedorismo que sejam suportadas por fundamentos teóricos consistentes, o objetivo desta pesquisa é compreender como professores ensinam empreendedorismo com fundamento na teoria effectuation. A pesquisa utiliza a metodologia de estudo de caso múltiplo - cinco experiências em quatro países - com intuito de compreender o contexto e a estrutura dos cursos, as metodologias de ensino utilizadas e a percepção dos docentes sobre as experiências de ensino. Como principais resultados, destaca-se a prática do modelo dinâmico de effectuation como elemento integrador presente em todos os casos, a identificação de metodologias de ensino emergentes e a categorização das metodologias de ensino em função das dimensões e comportamentos associados à teoria. Além disso, o estudo estabelece as primeiras relações da teoria com intenção de empreender e propõe que antecedentes pessoais do indivíduo, no caso, a cultura e educação formal, sejam testados em futuras pesquisas

Entrepreneurship Education at the Crossroads: Challenging Taken-for-Granted Assumptions and Opening New Perspectives

This work presents a synthesis of a debate regarding taken-for-granted assumptions and challenges in entrepreneurship education, matured after a developmental workshop organized to increase the research salience of the field. From the five contributions selected, three challenges emerge. The first is recognizing that participants’ representations about entrepreneurship play a crucial role in defining goals and impact of entrepreneurship education; second, integrating new perspectives of conceiving entrepreneurship into the current models of teaching entrepreneurship; and, lastly, facilitating the integration of entrepreneurship knowledge into practice. These challenges opened up to a conception of entrepreneurship education as a dynamic concept reflecting personal values, societal changes, and cultural differences. As a result, learning places of entrepreneurship education promotes exploration and not adaptation to existing schemes, where personal models for practicing entrepreneurship have room to emerge. Defining knowledge priorities, instead of targeting knowledge exhaustiveness, becomes of greatest importance to make entrepreneurship education‘s impact more relevant