Content area
Full Text
The primary purpose of this article is to clarify the nature of the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) construct and to propose a contingency framework for investigating the relationship between EO and firm performance. We first explore and refine the dimensions of EO and discuss the usefulness of viewing a firm's EO as a multidimensional construct. Then, drawing on examples from the EO-related contingencies literature. we suggest alternative models (moderating effects, mediating effects, independent effects, interaction effects) for testing the EO-performance relationship.
For both start-up ventures and existing firms, entrepreneurship carried on in the pursuit of business opportunities spurs business expansion, technological progress, and wealth creation. Entrepreneurial activity represents one of the major engines of economic growth and today accounts for the majority of new business development and job creation in the United States (Business Week, 1993). As such, writers in both the scholarly literature (e.g., Covin & Slevin, 1991) and popular press (e.g., Peters 8i Waterman, 1982) have argued that entrepreneurship is an essential feature of high-performing firms.
Entrepreneurship scholars have developed numerous typologies to describe alternate perspectives of entrepreneurship (e.g., Cooper & Dunkelberg, 1986; Schollhammer, 1982; Webster, 1977). These classification systems typically depict differences in entrepreneurship as the result of various combinations of individual, organizational, or environmental factors that influence how and why entrepreneurship occurs as it does. Although these efforts have served to point out the various dimensions of the entrepreneurial process, they have not led to any widely held consensus regarding how to characterize entrepreneurship. This lack of consensus has impeded progress for researchers toward building and testing a broader theory of entrepreneurship, and has made it especially difficult
The authors wish to thank AMR's reviewers and Jeff Covin. Matt Gilley, David Harrison, Ken Price, Richard Priem, Abdul Rasheed, Rod Shrader, and Bruce Walters for their many helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. for them to investigate the relationship of entrepreneurship to performance.
To address this problem, this article draws on prior theory and research to make a distinction between the concepts of entrepreneurship and "entrepreneurial orientation." The distinction is comparable to the one made in the strategic management literature between content and process (Bourgeois, 1980). The early strategy literature equated entrepreneurship with going into business, and the basic "entrepreneurial problem"...