Determining scientists’ academic engagement: perceptions of academic chairs’ entrepreneurial orientation and network capabilities

Abstract

Scientists’ engagement with industry is of undoubted interest to research and practice. Researchers do now recognize the organizational attributes of academic chairs as factors that potentially influence scientists’ activities. However, we know little about how scientists perceive academic chairs, and how this perception affects their individual academic engagement. Based on the theoretical concept of organizational climate, we investigate differences in the academic engagement of university scientists and find support for our theory that scientists’ academic engagement depends on how they perceive their academic chairs. Drawing on a dataset of 1428 university scientists, we theoretically derive and empirically validate the relationship between scientists’ perceptions of their academic chair’s entrepreneurial orientation and network capabilities and scientists’ individual academic engagement. We find that the perception of entrepreneurial orientation and network capabilities directly affects scientists’ academic engagement. Furthermore, the interaction between entrepreneurial orientation and network capability significantly enhances academic engagement. Entrepreneurial orientation and network capabilities thus emerge as important factors in an academic chair’s organizational climate.