Abstract
Individual-level opportunity recognition processes are vital to corporate entrepreneurship. However, little is known regarding how managerial communication impacts the effectiveness of idea suggestion systems in stimulating individuals' participation in intrapreneurial ideation. Integrating self-determination theory, creativity, and framing research, we theorize how different ways of inviting employees to submit proposals (opt-out/opt-in registration; provision of examples) affect the number and quality of submitted ideas. Our multi-method study (field experiment, vignette experiment, interviews) shows that (i) opt-out increases employee participation without reducing idea quality and (ii) the provision of examples enhances the usefulness of ideas but decreases novelty and the number of submissions.
Highlights
When firms seek to adopt an entrepreneurial strategy (Covin and Slevin, 1989, 1991; Engelen et al, 2015), a major challenge arises for managers: How can they motivate key personnel to invest time and effort—alongside their regular jobs—to creatively develop ideas and pursue them towards implementation? In short, how can managers encourage employees to behave more like entrepreneurs? After all, employees represent a group of individuals, who, by definition andselection are unlikely candidates for entrepreneurial behavior (Baron et al, 2016; Hisrich, 1990)
Considered the frequency and/or the quality of managerial communication but mostly in an aggregated way, such as a single global score (e.g., Antoncic and Hisrich, 2001; Park et al, 2014; Zahra, 1991), rather than by investigating the effects of specific characteristics of this communication. Extending this literature by offering a more fine-grained view, this study focuses on the framing of managerial communication, which refers to subtle manipulations in the formulation or contextual features of a problem (Kühberger, 1998)
In this study we examine the effect of two framing variations: first, opt-in vs. opt-out registration for a Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) initiative; with opt-out signaling that participation is socially desirable; and, second, provision of past CE examples in the invitation to participate in the initiative; with the examples establishing a frame of reference for idea development
Summary
When firms seek to adopt an entrepreneurial strategy (Covin and Slevin, 1989, 1991; Engelen et al, 2015), a major challenge arises for managers: How can they motivate key personnel to invest time and effort—alongside their regular jobs—to creatively develop ideas and pursue them towards implementation? In short, how can managers encourage employees to behave more like entrepreneurs? After all, employees represent a group of individuals, who, by definition and (self-)selection are unlikely candidates for entrepreneurial behavior (Baron et al, 2016; Hisrich, 1990). This challenge may call for managers to develop specific ways to support employees' corporate entrepreneurial endeavors (Corbett and Hmieleski, 2007). Hornsby et al (2009), for example, found that the relationship between characteristics of the internal corporate environment and individuals' intrapreneurial actions differed by managerial level. Individual-level CE studies increasingly advocate complementary analyses of lower-level managers and regular employees, their intrapreneurial activities, and their potentially diverging responses to antecedents within the internal corporate environment (e.g., Corbett et al, 2013; Hughes et al, 2018; Phan et al, 2009)—a call that this study takes up
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