A two-level, longitudinal investigation into the effects of employee social entrepreneurship orientation and top management team decisions on product innovation

Abstract

While social entrepreneurship orientation (SEO) is a relatively new field of study, thanks to SEO researchers' efforts we have learned how SEO influences firm performance, notably innovation performance. However, there is still a clear lack of empirical work on how social entrepreneurial employees within an organization and specific decision characteristics of top management they work under may influence innovation performance. This study aims to contribute to the above issues by adopting a meso-to-micro approach to investigating how top management team (TMT) decision creativity and speed influence the effects of employee social entrepreneurship orientation (eSEO) on firms' product innovation performance. To reveal the dynamics of eSEO over-time, we adopted a longitudinal research design to collect data from 2567 employees, one TMT member, and one new product development manager from each of the 206 social enterprises, with a secondary proxy dataset to triangulate the primary data. Our results show that high TMT decision creativity helps social enterprises leverage eSEO to enhance product innovation performance, while high TMT decision speed fails to produce the same effect. When high TMT decision creativity is coupled with low TMT decision speed, the contribution of eSEO to product innovation is at its largest.