Resource knowledge, organizational slack, and entrepreneurial orientation.

摘要

Questions of what makes a firm entrepreneurial, and how do firms promote entrepreneurial behaviors, are of significant import to strategic management and entrepreneurship scholars. Indeed, a significant body of literature exists that delineates theoretically meaningful organizational antecedents to firm-level entrepreneurship, and there are a growing number of theoretical perspectives that prescribe the conditions under which corporate entrepreneurship is likely to flourish. One such perspective is subjectivist entrepreneurship theory, which suggests that entrepreneurial opportunity recognition is a function of employee's knowledge of their firm's idiosyncratic resource stocks, and specifically, knowledge of how those resources can be combined in new value creating manners. Furthermore, subjectivist entrepreneurship theory also suggests that unused firm resources, or organizational slack, will influence future entrepreneurial action, and that there is an expected interaction between knowledge of firm resources and organizational slack in determining the extent of a firm's use of entrepreneurship to improve its competitiveness.;The purpose of this study is two-fold. The first is to test the propositions put forth by subjectivist entrepreneurship theory by exploring the relationship between resource knowledge---defined as firm employee's understanding of the uses, capabilities, characteristics and functionality of firm resources---organizational slack, and entrepreneurial orientation (EO), defined as the extent to which firms are innovative, proactive, and risk-taking in their behaviors and general management philosophies. The second is to build theory in the area of EO through the conceptual development of the resource knowledge construct and its causal adjacency to EO, and how organizational slack relates in both form and function to firm-level entrepreneurial behaviors. Drawing from a sample of 252 firms that were consistent members of the S&P 500 index from the period of 1999-2008, this study finds that resource knowledge is a significant predictor of entrepreneurial behavior. Furthermore, available, recoverable and potential slack---the three unique dimensions of organizational slack---influence, in a curvilinear manner, EO. Resource knowledge also amplifies or attenuates, as theoretically expected, the curvilinear effects of slack on entrepreneurial orientation.