Entrepreneurship is a process by which individuals, either on their own or inside an organization, pursue opportunities without regard to the resources they currently control. The following comments set the focus: 1. Great companies have a culture of discipline where rigor and discipline enable creativity and entrepreneurship. 2. As control systems provide strategic direction to the innovative efforts of firms, the efficiencies they produce can free up resources for innovation. 3. The challenge to management lies in designing work environments that are consistent with and reinforce entrepreneurial behavior on the part of employees. 4. Based on review of extant literature, the paper postulates three hypotheses, H1, H2 and H3, covering the three dimensions of control, i.e., administrative formality/informality, managerial flexibility/inflexibility,and budgetrary tightness/looseness. These hypotheses were tested using 475 responses from 201 organizations corresponding to both a midwestern state and a western state in the United States. Exploratory factor analysis and nonlinear regression analysis were used for detailed analysis of the models and hypotheses. Support was found partially for H1 and fully for H3, while no support was found for H2. The paper suggests that certain characteristics of control can serve to facilitate entrepreneurial behavior on the part of employees. The emphasis required is not on more or less control, but rather on the type of control and the ability of able managers to achieve a balance in terms of control. (83 refs.)
展开▼
