Title: Measuring corporate entrepreneurship culture

Authors: Frank Bau; Kerstin Wagner

Addresses: University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur, Comercialstrasse 22, CH-7000, Chur, Switzerland ' Swiss Institute for Entrepreneurship, HTW Chur, Commercialstrasse 22, 7000, Chur, Switzerland

Abstract: Corporate entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship are behavioural and cultural patterns that can help companies to grow competitive changing environmental conditions. Literature on internal firm factors was used to develop the corporate entrepreneurship index (CESi) adaptive on the employee level. This study develops and assesses the index measuring organisational, culture-related and market-related factors that might influence the employees' abilities to intrapreneurial behaviour. Data were collected from a Swiss health insurance company with the biannual employee opinion survey covering 301 respondents. Based on factor analysis of 33 items, our empirical findings identified four key factors: 1) leadership quality and effectiveness; 2) cooperation, information and innovation; 3) product and market knowledge; 4) tasks and responsibility. The paper contributes to the literature with a new tool to measure the perception on all employees' level. From a practical perspective, the results indicate that the CESi delivers data to better understand the current strength of the corporate entrepreneurship (CE) culture to design effective interventions.

Keywords: corporate entrepreneurship; innovation; entrepreneurial behaviour; employees; corporate culture; organisational culture; entrepreneurship culture; intrapreneurship; Switzerland; health insurance industry; employee perceptions; leadership quality; leadership effectiveness; cooperation; information; product knowledge; market knowledge; tasks; responsibility; interventions.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2015.069287

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2015 Vol.25 No.2, pp.231 - 244

Published online: 08 May 2015 *

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