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Introduction
The idea of organizational entrepreneurship offers enticing prospects for enhancing performance in public agencies. How better to deal with tightening budgets, political scrutiny and increased public demands than for a government to empower its employees to be more “entrepreneurial” – to find better ways to accomplish tasks. Translating a market-oriented concept into the public administration space has yielded rather limited and somewhat mixed results. Merely defining what the parameters of entrepreneurship look like in public agencies poses several problems. Is entrepreneurship grand innovation or novel process improvement? Is it inward-looking or outward looking? Who can be a government entrepreneur? Perhaps even more elemental, should government bureaucracies be entrepreneurial?
One area that both empirical and theoretical scholarship has tended to ignore is the relationship between managerial practices and employee “alertness” to new opportunities. Resolving this gap in scholarship is important because understanding entrepreneurship and its correlates (i.e. innovation) requires an understanding of what makes employees “alert” to new opportunities in the first place. In other words, how do managerial practices affect the processes of looking for new opportunities? Conceptually, this is an interesting area for further exploration for several reasons. First, integrating alertness into theoretical models of public entrepreneurship suggests a shift in focus from a specific outcome (i.e. an innovation) to processes that may (or may not) lead to innovation. That is, being alert is independent of a specific type or quantity of innovation. This way of thinking tends to fit better within government organizational settings, where outputs are not easily measured, constrained by external political forces, and organizational missions are relatively rigid. Second, focusing on alertness lends itself to a better explanation of the spontaneity and serendipity of entrepreneurship that is typical in the private sector. In other words, current models of organizational entrepreneurship in the public sector assume that innovation is a function of organizational- and individual-level factors, which ignores spontaneity. On the other hand, an “alert” employee can take advantage of serendipitous circumstances.
Scholarship has not entirely ignored the discovery process altogether, but as Shockley Stough, Haynes and Frank (2006) pointed out, most have under-specified its role, or they have discounted its theoretical underpinnings altogether. Focusing merely on the process of opportunity exploitation misses the potential contributions of employees “being alert”...