Individual and team entrepreneurial orientation: Scale development and configurations for success

Abstract

While entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has traditionally been defined and operationalized as a firm-level phenomenon, recent studies extended the construct to the individual-level (IEO). We theorize how teams might draw on the EO of their individual members, forming what we call Team EO, and pose that EO will manifest in corollary attitudes and behaviors among employees to enable its organizational pervasiveness. Building on social exchange theory, theories of organizational citizenship and extra-role behavior, we conceive and explore how risk-taking, proactiveness, and innovativeness within a team, in conjunction with its trust in the manager and commitment to company goals, affect performance. Results from an fsQCA analysis with 71 teams from a large service-sector company show that proactiveness and innovativeness serve as substitutes and need to be combined with a commitment to company goals to achieve high performance.