دانلود رایگان مقاله هم ارزی سنجش گرایش به کارآفرینی در شیب اجتماعی و اقتصادی

Abstract

While entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is often conceptualized on a firm level of analysis, scholarship has highlighted that firm-level strategy is influenced by the psychology of managers. Because an individual's psychological approach to risk-taking is influenced by socioeconomic factors, we explored whether responses to risk-taking items in scales of individual-level entrepreneurial attitudes and firm-level EO are influenced by socioeconomic status and the socioeconomic development of regions. Testing for measurement equivalence (ME), we found evidence consistent with the inference that items relating not only to risk-taking, but also to innovativeness and proactivity, are thought of differently according to socioeconomic influences on individual and regional levels of analysis. We discuss the implications of our results including the need for researchers to test for ME when exploring entrepreneurial attitudes and EO across socioeconomic gradients.

6. Discussion

The present work was based on three contentions: (1) managers’ attitudes regarding risk-taking are likely to help determine, or at least influence the measurement of, a firm's entrepreneurial strategy when that estimation relies on individual self-report (Anderson et al., 2015; Frese, 2009; Hambrick and Mason, 1984); (2) socioeconomic forces on multiple levels of analysis can shape the conceptualization of risk-taking in relation to other entrepreneurial constructs (Hobfoll, 1989); and (3) without appreciating sources of a lack of ME, signals regarding entrepreneurial attitudes or a firm's EO might be misinterpreted. The first, and clearest, implication of our discovery of a lack of full metric and scalar, and arguably configural, ME in the U.S. and Montenegro is that researchers need to test for ME when conducting research among entrepreneurs and firms that operate across varying socioeconomic contexts. It is possible that problems of a lack of ME could have serious consequences (e.g., by indicating spurious correlations or mean-level differences); indeed, as evidenced in the Monte-Carlo simulation by Steinmetz (2013), while the comparability of scales might survive a lack of metric ME in a majority of items, even one non-invariant intercept in a 4–6 item scale might lead to an elevated chance of Type-I error. Testing for ME in EO scales is rare even when working across different countries (Runyan et al., 2012), and to our knowledge, this is the first study that has tested for ME in EO across socioeconomic contexts. Our results also highlight the potential peril of relying upon the self-report of a single manager to evaluate a firm's EO. Without evaluating objective firm behaviors and/or the self-report of multiple managers, it is impossible to separate construct-irrelevant from construct-relevant variance. We note in particular that studies exploring the difference between needs-based entrepreneurs in financially insecure contexts and opportunity-based entrepreneurs in financially secure contexts (see Block et al., 2015) will need to pay particular attention to issues of ME before comparisons of entrepreneurial attitudes or EO are made.