Logics, Leaders, Lab Coats: A Multi-Level Study on How Institutional Logics are Linked to Entrepreneurial Intentions in Academia

Situated in the context of academia, this study integrates ideas from institutional theory, person-environment fit theory and leadership research to conceptualize and examine the cross-level link between the organizational-level institutional logic of research commercialization and the entrepreneurial intentions of researchers. Multi-level analyses based on a sample of 254 researchers working for 85 research group leaders in 49 German research institutes reveal that two distinct attributes of research group leaders - that is, their track records of entrepreneurial behaviour and their entrepreneurial intentions - play a significant role in transmitting the organizational-level logic to the individual level. We also observe a complementary interaction between organizational-level commercialization logic and the entrepreneurial track records of leaders. We discuss how these findings advance our understanding of science commercialization through academic entrepreneurship and how they inform institutional theory and theory development in other domains of entrepreneurship research