Examining Internal Environment for Corporate Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Serbian Public Sector

Abstract

In today’s fast-changing, turbulent and highly competitive business environment, internal entrepreneurship, i.e. intrapreneurship is seen as an instrument for established organizations to provide a fast response to new business challenges and opportunities. It is especially demanding and challenging to encourage intrapreneurship in the public sector organizations where, compared to the private sector, there is a much greater diversity of objectives to be fulfilled, as well as a greater conflict between profit and social responsibility; less flexibility in the decision-making process; and where financial incentives for improvements are much smaller. This paper examines the level of internal environment development for internal entrepreneurship in the public sector of the Republic of Serbia, as well as the differences in the tendency towards internal entrepreneurship among three categories of public organizational systems (public institutions, public administration, and public enterprises). For this purpose, Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument (CEAI) developed by Kuratko, Hornsby, and Covin (2014) is used as a research tool developed for diagnosing organization’s internal environment for entrepreneurship through five dimensions: top management support, work discretion/autonomy, rewards/reinforcement, time availability, and organizational boundaries. The Survey sample covers 126 employees from Serbian public sector organizations.