Abstract
While prior literature has widely acknowledged that the entrepreneurial environment significantly fertilizes entrepreneurship, the impact of workplace receives limited attention, and the vital role of organizations in linking social entrepreneurial environment and employee entrepreneurship has been largely ignored. Therefore, this study aims to unfold how multiple entrepreneurial environments (i.e., social, organizational, and interpersonal factors) shape employee entrepreneurship and then further reveal how such relationships vary with employees’ risk propensity. Drawn on the theoretical lens of mindsponge process, which offers an explanation of why and how organizations and individuals adopt new values through the cost-benefit analysis, we proposed a research model to explain the influence mechanisms of the social entrepreneurial environment on the cost-benefit analysis of both organizations and individual employees. Specifically, given that organizations deeply embedded in the society need to balance the costs and benefits under the pressure of the social entrepreneurial environment, the social entrepreneurial environment affects the organizational entrepreneurial environment (i.e., organizational hostility toward employee entrepreneurship). Similarly, employees’ cost-benefit analysis under the pressure of organizational hostility will influence their entrepreneurial intentions. Through analyzing the data collected from a two-wave survey with 220 employees, we showed that organizational hostility toward employee entrepreneurship plays a mediating role between social entrepreneurial environment and employees’ entrepreneurial intentions. In addition, such mediation relationship is moderated by coworkers’ unethical behaviors during their entrepreneurship and employees’ risk propensity, which are expected to influence organizations’ and employees’ cost-benefit analysis, respectively.
Highlights
Employee entrepreneurship, referring to the phenomenon that employees quit their jobs to start their own new ventures (Ganco, 2013; Ye et al, 2021b), is not uncommon all around the world (Franco, 2005)
The balance method was used to package unethical behavior and entrepreneurial intentions, and the average value of each dimension of entrepreneurial environment was used as the measurement index for the corresponding dimension
The results showed that the five-factor model fits the data well: χ2(125) = 222.85, χ2/df = 1.78, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.06, root mean square residual (RMR) = 0.06, comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.95, goodness of fit index (GFI) = 0.90, incremental fit index (IFI) = 0.95, and Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) = 0.94
Summary
Employee entrepreneurship, referring to the phenomenon that employees quit their jobs to start their own new ventures (Ganco, 2013; Ye et al, 2021b), is not uncommon all around the world (Franco, 2005). Due to the mass entrepreneurship and innovation policy in China, there is an increasing number of employees leaving their original organizations to create new ventures (Kaul et al, 2021; Wang L. et al, 2021). Studies show that the original organizations may play a decisive and dominant role in directly influencing employee entrepreneurship (Gambardella et al, 2015; Agarwal et al, 2016b), while social and interpersonal environments influence employee entrepreneurship in an indirect way. Prior studies paid more attention to the influences of objective characteristics, for instant, organizational age and size (Agarwal et al, 2016a). It is still unclear whether and how subjective factors (i.e., organizations’ subjective attitudes toward employee entrepreneurship) shape employee entrepreneurship (Campbell et al, 2012; Walter et al, 2014)
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