Innovative behaviour, trust and perceived workplace performance

Building on theories of social exchange, enactment, and trust, we provide a theorization of innovative work behaviour at the individual (IB) and team (IBT) levels and explain how desirable performance returns occur for individuals and teams. We further propose that horizontal (between team members) and vertical (between teams and their supervisor) team trust moderate the relationship between IBT and team performance. The results based on surveys conducted at two points in time in a large insurance company in the Netherlands show that employees’ IB is positively associated with perceived workplace performance at the individual and team levels and that the effects vary based on the forms of trust at play. Our findings offer important new knowledge about the consequences of entrepreneurship and innovation in the workplace and the significant role that trust plays in enabling such behaviour to promote perceived workplace performance, particularly in the vital financial services sector

Family firms, alliance governance and mutual knowledge creation

For family firms, alliances represent a form of heightened entrepreneurial risk-taking. However, a dearth of research exists on the implications of forms of alliance governance for family firms. In a study of 939 non-equity alliances of family and non-family firms, we analyse how contracts and trust influence mutual knowledge creation. Both contract completeness and trust assist non-family firms in knowledge creation. However, family firms rely on high levels of trust for the creation of knowledge. Knowledge creation suffers when family firms encounter very complete contracts tied to attempts at high levels of trust. The negative interaction effect is especially strong for non-owner-run family firms

Individual and team entrepreneurial orientation: Scale development and configurations for success

While entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has traditionally been defined and operationalized as a firm-level phenomenon, recent studies extended the construct to the individual-level (IEO). We theorize how teams might draw on the EO of their individual members, forming what we call Team EO, and pose that EO will manifest in corollary attitudes and behaviors among employees to enable its organizational pervasiveness. Building on social exchange theory, theories of organizational citizenship and extra-role behavior, we conceive and explore how risk-taking, proactiveness, and innovativeness within a team, in conjunction with its trust in the manager and commitment to company goals, affect performance. Results from an fsQCA analysis with 71 teams from a large service-sector company show that proactiveness and innovativeness serve as substitutes and need to be combined with a commitment to company goals to achieve high performance