Person-level entrepreneurial orientation: clues to the 'entrepreneurial mindset'?

Abstract

The growing interest in the 'entrepreneurial mindset' has not been matched by efforts to rigorously conceptualise and measure it. One theoretically and empirically promising approach is to look at entrepreneurial orientation (EO). Does there exist an individual-level 'entrepreneurial orientation' analogous to well-validated organisation-level EO? EO presumes that entrepreneurial organisations reflect strong organisational biases toward being innovative, independent/autonomous, proactive, risk-accepting, and aggressively competitive. However, as organisations' behaviours arguably reflect their leadership (e.g., Miller et al., 1982; Hambrick and Mason, 1984; Jelenc and Pisapia, 2015), thus their managers (and perhaps employees) would share these biases. We identify multiple psychometrically-sound, malleable measures for each dimension analogous to EO to produce valid elements of a person-level EO that can be tested against entrepreneurial behaviour and intent. To that end, we offer here that these dimensions should give us a powerful toolkit to assess deep changes in the entrepreneurial mindset reflected in tangible behaviour.