The impact of organizational culture on entrepreneurial orientation: A meta-analysis

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Abstract

The importance of organizational culture (OC) on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has long been of interest to scholars and practitioners. Nevertheless, there remains contradictory results about the impact of OC on EO. Drawing upon the competing value framework (CVF), I conduct a meta-analysis of 70 papers to better understand this relationship. The result highlights first that, contrary to common thinking, there is not only one particular organizational culture that impacts positively EO. Clan, Market and Adhocracy all have a positive impact on EO. Second, even if each of these OC types has a positive impact on EO, the impact on each dimension of EO (Innovativeness, Risk-taking and Proactiveness) may vary. This result reopens the debate about the uni versus multidimensionality of EO.

Section snippets

Introduction: description of the problem

Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO), which can be defined as “a firm strategic posture toward entrepreneurship” (Anderson et al., 2015) is a vibrant topic in entrepreneurship research (Covin and Wales, 2019). Several meta-analyses have already demonstrated its positive impact on firm performance (Do Couto Soares and Perin, 2019; Rauch et al., 2009; Saeed et al., 2014). For this reason, researchers have studied different antecedents of EO. One of them, the organizational culture (OC), has been

OC and the competing value framework (CVF)

OC is difficult to decipher because it includes “values, beliefs and assumptions” (Schein, 1985) which are not easily measurable. To analyze the relationship between OC and EO, a convincing theoretical explanation of OC is needed. Wilkins and Ouchi (1983), in their paper on efficient culture, explain that it is easier to define culture by type because the type of culture will determine its goals and means of increasing efficiency. Defining OC by type helps in producing “a classification of

Literature survey and selection strategy

To identify relevant articles for the meta-analysis, I conducted a comprehensive search for studies in different databases including EBSCO, JSTOR, PROQUEST, WILEY, SCIENCE DIRECT, ABI INFORM and GOOGLE SCHOLAR. In each database, in the research tab I used the combinations of one term belonging to the Entrepreneurial Orientation and one term belonging to the Organizational Culture. For the terms related to Entrepreneurial Orientation I used the following words: Entrepreneurial Orientation,

Results

The bivariate analysis is summarized in Table 4.

Dependent variable. Our results show that, as expected, Adhocracy culture is the best OC to increase EO with an effect size of 0.455 validating hypothesis H1. Our results also validate H2 and H3 showing that Market and Clan organization impact positively EO with respectively Rcorr ​= ​0.388 and Rcorr ​= ​0.368. Concerning Hierarchy organization, our result does not validate H4. Indeed, the impact of hierarchy organization on EO (Rcorr ​= ​0.112)

Discussion

Our results confirm that Adhocracy in companies is positively related to EO. This is in line with all the literature concerning those new “ad-hoc” organizations (Google, Facebook, etc.) which allow entrepreneurial orientation to increase through the focus on agility and reactiveness (Green et al., 2008). What is surprising in our result, however, is the fact that two opposing organizational culture types (in the CVF) - Clan and Market - can both have a positive impact on EO. This result

Conclusions

Our study is the first meta-analysis that analyzes the impact of organizational culture on entrepreneurial orientation and our results highlight some important contributions concerning this. First, by completing a meta-analysis we have summarized all previous studies that have looked at this topic and can confirm that there are several organizational culture types that can increase EO. Adhocracy, Clan and Market impact positively EO. We have also contributed to the debate surrounding the

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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