Employees’ entrepreneurial behaviour: the influence of employees’ socio-cognitive traits and country-level institutional context

Abstract

Firm-level entrepreneurship, referred to as corporate entrepreneurship (CE), is a strategic choice for firms’ vitality and competitiveness. Over the last five decades, research focused on CE’s firm-level or group-level antecedents to determine factors fostering organisations’ entrepreneurial activities. Research also established that, at the individual-level, employees’ entrepreneurial behaviour (EEB) influences an organisation’s entrepreneurial growth and overall performance. However, research on the individual-level antecedents of EEB is disparate and scarce. In Stage 1, this thesis applies a multi-level meta-analysis to aggregate findings from 102 independent samples from 97 articles from 1994 up to 2022. This meta-analysis, the first to assess CE’s antecedents, combines empirical findings on the antecedents of CE across the top management team (TMT) and firm levels. The cumulative evidence, examined through a metaregression, shows that a TMT’s entrepreneurial human capital, transformational leadership and firm’s building blocks, resources, and capabilities are positive drivers of CE. Stage 2 focuses on the employee level and answers recent calls to study EEB as a multilevel phenomenon. Based on the integrative framework of social cognitive theory (Bandura 1988) and institutional economics theory (North 1990), it investigates the associations among EEB, employees’ socio-cognitive traits and country-level institutional factors using a multilevel 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, the Economic Freedom Index, the Global Competitiveness Index, World Bank and the International Labour Organisation. 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 countrylevel institutional factors influence the likelihood that employees will mobilise their sociocognitive resources to pursue high-growth entrepreneurship