Corporate entrepreneurship environment and organizational performance in technology manufacturing sector

This study attempts to investigate the relationship between the corporate entrepreneurship environment and organizational performance from a middle managers' perspective in the Taiwan technology manufacturing sector. Researchers assessed key internal organizational factors that influence middle managers in the corporate entrepreneurship environment, such as management support, work discretion, rewards, time availability, and organizational boundaries. In addition, corporate entrepreneurship is named as encompassing three related components: product innovation, proactiveness, and risk taking. In this paper, organizational performance was measured as: innovation performance, market performance and financial performance. Utilizing information provided by middle managers from our 500 validated questionnaires and taking into account suggestions from entrepreneurial researchers the five internal organizational factors were identified and investigated, plus the three related components for corporate entrepreneurship were also identified. The crux of the study is the analysis of the five organizational factors in relationship to the three related corporate entrepreneurship components and their total effect on organizational performance. Corporate entrepreneurs with proactiveness are positively associated with innovation performance, market performance and financial performance, resulting as the most important relationship in the study. In general, four of the five internal organizational factors (management support, work discretion, rewards, time availability, and organizational boundaries) clearly highlighted that they positively influence organizational performance. Among these four, rewards and organizational boundaries were the most significant. Only time availability is negatively associated with organizational performance, with the implication that if firms add work, time constraints, standard operating procedures and documented working processes, then middle managers would have a more limited time frame to improve or design new strategies for their firms.