Pervasiveness of Entrepreneurial Orientation: Do Engagement and Voice Behavior Matter?

A long-standing line of research proves a positive relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and performance of firms. Still, it is surprising, how little we know about the way entrepreneurial orientation is shaped, fostered, developed and maintained within organizations. Wales, Monsen, and Mckelvie (2011) have recently argued that the way entrepreneurial orientation is manifested across the organization may vary vertically across hierarchy levels, horizontally across business units and temporally as an organization develops. Indeed, large diversified firms contain multiple business units that can differ in the level of the entrepreneurial orientation. Therefore organizations that are aiming at properly managing their entrepreneurial posture need to investigate the sources of heterogeneity of manifestations of entrepreneurial orientation at different levels and units of the organization. In this paper we add to the literature by looking into the question why some units within firms may display higher entrepreneurial orientation levels than others and suggest a new look at both the employee engagement and its relation with the business entity’s entrepreneurial orientation. We suggest that the heterogeneity of the entrepreneurial orientation manifestations may be linked to the business unit employees’ work emotional and cognitive engagement and their extra-role voice behaviors. The study is conducted on a sample of business units from an industrial company observed at two different points of time, separately for managers and staff. We find partial confirmation for our hypotheses and we contribute to the literature by showing that different groups of employees contribute to the pervasiveness of entrepreneurial orientation in different ways.