Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

An operationalization of Stevenson's conceptualization of entrepreneurship as opportunity‐based firm behavior

An operationalization of Stevenson's conceptualization of entrepreneurship as opportunity‐based... Stevenson (1983) holds that entrepreneurial management, defined as a set of opportunity‐based management practices, can help firms remain vital and contribute to firm and societal level value creation. While his conceptualization has received much attention, little progress has been made because of a lack of empirical tools to examine his propositions. This article seeks to resolve this by describing a new instrument that was developed specifically for operationalizing Stevenson's conceptualization. After two pre‐tests, the instrument was tested full scale on a very large (1200+ cases) stratified random sample of firms with different size, governance structure, and industry affiliation. The results show that both in the full sample and in various sub‐samples it was possible to identify six sub‐dimensions with high discriminant validity and moderate to high reliability, which represent dimensions of Stevenson's theoretical reasoning. We label these Strategic Orientation, Resource Orientation, Management Structure, Reward Philosophy, Growth Orientation and Entrepreneurial Culture. We were further able to show that these dimensions only partly overlap with ‘Entrepreneurial Orientation’, the hitherto best established empirical instrument for assessing a firm's degree of entrepreneurship. Our instrument should open up opportunities for researchers to further evaluate entrepreneurship in existing firms. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Strategic Management Journal Wiley

An operationalization of Stevenson's conceptualization of entrepreneurship as opportunity‐based firm behavior

Download PDF
16 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/wiley/an-operationalization-of-stevenson-s-conceptualization-of-3EVba2e0j0

References (31)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ISSN
0143-2095
eISSN
1097-0266
DOI
10.1002/smj.190
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Stevenson (1983) holds that entrepreneurial management, defined as a set of opportunity‐based management practices, can help firms remain vital and contribute to firm and societal level value creation. While his conceptualization has received much attention, little progress has been made because of a lack of empirical tools to examine his propositions. This article seeks to resolve this by describing a new instrument that was developed specifically for operationalizing Stevenson's conceptualization. After two pre‐tests, the instrument was tested full scale on a very large (1200+ cases) stratified random sample of firms with different size, governance structure, and industry affiliation. The results show that both in the full sample and in various sub‐samples it was possible to identify six sub‐dimensions with high discriminant validity and moderate to high reliability, which represent dimensions of Stevenson's theoretical reasoning. We label these Strategic Orientation, Resource Orientation, Management Structure, Reward Philosophy, Growth Orientation and Entrepreneurial Culture. We were further able to show that these dimensions only partly overlap with ‘Entrepreneurial Orientation’, the hitherto best established empirical instrument for assessing a firm's degree of entrepreneurship. Our instrument should open up opportunities for researchers to further evaluate entrepreneurship in existing firms. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal

Strategic Management Journal – Wiley

Published: Oct 1, 2001

There are no references for this article.