مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) entails the extent to which an organization’s top managers emphasize risk-taking, proactivity, and innovativeness in firm strategy (Covin et al., 2006; Lyon et al., 2000; Miller, 1983). EO is an important underpinning of the extent to which entrepreneurial behavior in the firm is encouraged, undertaken, and rewarded (Lumpkin and Dess, 1996), and evidence suggests that more entrepreneurially oriented firms tend to perform better, especially in dynamic environments (Rosenbusch et al., 2013; Wiklund and Shepherd, 2005). Considering these performance benefits and in line with an emerging emphasis on drivers of EO in literature, Ruiz-Ortega et al. (2013) recently explored whether firms operating in dynamic environments are indeed more entrepreneurially oriented. Although the expected benefits of EO in dynamic environments are well documented, and EO is instrumental for capturing emerging opportunities, top managers may struggle to foster EO due to the increased uncertainty inherent to dynamic environments. Uncertainty may instead trigger conservative responses through reliance on familiar routines (Muurlink et al., 2012) and attempts to improve efficiency (Chattopadhyay et al., 2001). Thus, the question remains: How can top managers enhance entrepreneurial orientation in dynamic environments?

In this study we examine the role of the top management team (TMT) in enhancing EO in dynamic environments. While previous studies have mainly investigated the relation between EO and firm performance, we draw on upper echelons theory and bolster the increasing emphasis on TMTs in EO scholarship (Miller and Le Breton-Miller, 2011; Van Doorn et al., 2013). Upper echelons theory proposes that strategic choices reflect the idiosyncrasies of decision makers and recent studies indeed have highlighted the impact of compositional attributes of top managers on EO (Boling et al., 2015; Miller and Le Breton-Miller, 2011; Sciascia et al., 2013; Wales et al., 2013). However, we argue that going beyond demographic attributes is an important next step in understanding EO from an upper echelons perspective.

We extend upper echelons based inquiries into EO by contending that it is important to take into account the tendency of the TMT to acquire external information to improve judgment accuracy on emerging opportunities in dynamic environments. We develop this premise by drawing on the emerging literature on TMT external advice-seeking, which suggests that top managers rely on advisors to inform their judgments under uncertainty (McMullen and Shepherd, 2006) (e.g., such as the uncertainty inherent to dynamic environments (Fredrickson and Mitchell, 1984; Heavey et al., 2009b). Given that entrepreneurial opportunities in dynamic environments require TMTs to process information that is relatively new to the firm, we additionally assess TMT absorptive capacity, i.e. their ability to filter, process, and assimilate new information (Zahra et al., 2009). TMTs may better capitalize on external insights that enable understanding of emerging and future opportunities in the environment when they have the absorptive capacity to adequately interpret these new insights and its implications for firm strategy (Goll et al., 2007).