Intrapreneurship: a Psychological Perspective

To maintain and maximize organizational effectiveness, modern organizations increasingly depend on a phenomenon called intrapreneurship. Intrapreneurship captures an organization’s activities aimed at creating new business and strategically renewing organizational vision, policies, and processes. Since its introduction in the 1980s (Burgelman, 1982; Pinchot, 1985), intrapreneurship has been put forward as an important means for organizations to simultaneously develop and nurture today’s and tomorrow’s competitive advantage (Antoncic & Hisrich, 2003; Morris et al., 2011). Indeed, structurally investing in intrapreneurial activities seems to be fruitful for organizations. Research has shown that it positively relates to profits and return on sales and assets (Bierweth, Schwens, Isidor, & Kabst, 2015). Although the benefits of intrapreneurship are predominantly discussed in the context of privately held organizations, its benefits are not limited to the private sector (De Vries et al., 2016). Intrapreneurship in the public sector has been shown to positively impact public value creation (Kearny & Meynhardt, 2016). Through intrapreneurship, the UK National Health Services was able to create procedures that reduced waiting lists for elective care (Pope et al., 2006), and several governmental organizations enhanced their problem-solving capacity in dealing with societal challenges (cf. Damanpour & Schneider, 2009). To better explain how intrapreneurship can be beneficial for organizations, scholars and practitioners have shifted their attention away from the macro-level outcomes of intrapreneurship (i.e., increased profits and public value), toward the micro-level processes of intrapreneurship (i.e., the roles and behaviors of organizational members). This research substantially increased our understanding of how employees contribute to the process of intrapreneurship (Belousova & Gailly, 2013) and their proclivity towards intrapreneurial behaviors (De Jong, Parker, Wennekers, & Wu, 2013). However, besides providing valuable insights, research on the micro level of intrapreneurship has also raised new questions that current research has not yet been able to thoroughly address (Blanka, 2018). For instance, what are the psychological mechanisms that can explain why employees decide to engage in intrapreneurial activities? Also, if employees are expected to be both proficient in their job, and engage in generating, championing, and implementing intrapreneurial ideas, how does this affect their in-role performance and well-being? With these questions in mind, this dissertation sets out to increase our understanding of the psychology behind intrapreneurship. This dissertation presents a series of studies in which a multi-level framework on the antecedents and outcomes of employees’ intrapreneurial behaviors is investigated