Individual entrepreneurial orientation and performance: the mediating role of international entrepreneurship
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Individual entrepreneurial orientation and performance: the mediating role of international entrepreneurship Francisco Javier Forcadell 1
& Fernando
Úbeda 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper analyses the role that individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) plays in the success of international entrepreneurship moves. We focus on the mediation effect of international entrepreneurship in the relationship between IEO and firm performance. We argue that entrepreneurial experience constitutes an important source of IEO and propose an objective measure of IEO. The hypotheses are empirically analysed using a 22-year panel of family SMEs. Our results confirm the hypotheses and provide a better understanding of the role of IEO in the success of corporate strategies such as internationalisation. Specifically, IEO is found to improve firm performance indirectly by increasing the speed of internationalisation, and this effect is non-linear. Our study contributes to the literature by extending international entrepreneurship literature by offering a more complete view of the causes and consequences of IEO. Finally, our results also contribute to the literature on family firm heterogeneity. Keywords Individual entrepreneurial orientation . International entrepreneurship .
Entrepreneurial experience . Performance . SME . Family firm . Objective measure
Introduction The concept of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) (Covin and Slevin 1989, 1991; Lumpkin and Dess 1996; Miller 1983), or ‘the strategy-making processes that provide * Francisco Javier Forcadell [email protected] Fernando Úbeda [email protected]
1
ESIC Business and Marketing School. Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain
2
Autonomous University, Madrid, Spain
International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal
organisations with a basis for entrepreneurial decisions and actions’ (Rauch et al. 2009: 762), is widely considered to be a cornerstone of the entrepreneurship literature. EO has traditionally been defined and operationalised at the firm level (Covin et al. 2020), exercising a positive effect on performance (Rauch et al. 2009). Nevertheless, only a limited set of studies consider mediating effects between EO and performance, for example innovation (Kollmann and Stöckmann 2014; Shan et al. 2016), or learning (Alegre and Chiva 2013; Real et al. 2014; Rhee et al. 2010; Wang 2008). Thus, research on this strand of literature has neglected to address the indirect effects of EO on performance through the corporate moves (e.g. international entrepreneurship) generated by EO, despite the fact that these moves are the ‘central and essential element in the entrepreneurial process’ (Covin and Slevin 1991: 8). Over the last few years, some studies have extended the notion of EO to the individual level, referred to as individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO). Covin et al. (2020: 2) define IEO as ‘a tendency held by individual employees of the organization towards innovative, proacti
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