Intrapreneurship construct and its effects on the firm performance a survey of the tekstile firms in Denizli

Intrapreneurship is the concept used to describe the entrepreneurial orientation and activities inside existing organizations. It has been attracting a great attention of scholars and practitioners since 1980's. In general, intrapreneurship is an important element for organizational and economic development. More specifically, it is viewed that intrapreneurship has beneficial effects on revitalization of organizations and improvements of organizational performance. Therefore, intrapreneurship is essential for large corporations as well as small and medium sized enterprises. This dissertation both theoretically and empirically examines the concept of intrapreneurship, its main determinants (i.e, organizational and environmental factors) and its effects on the firm performance. As a multidimensional structure, intrapreneurship is defined as a transformation process of innovative ideas into new product, services or business by the autonomous strategic behaviors of employee that are related to departure from traditional ways of doing business in established organizations. In this study the intrapreneurship construct includes seven distinct dimensions: innovativeness, new business venturing, self-renewal, risk taking, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness and autonomy. The intra-organizational and environmental factors were also examined as the determinants of intrapreneurship structure. On the basis of these theoretical grounds, an integrative multidimensional intrapreneurship model was developed to test in the existing firms. This model was quantitatively tested on the basis of survey responses from 107 established textile production firms from the Denizli province in Turkey.This study empirically investigates the nature of the variables of the model and its effects. Empirical results suggest that both environmental and ultra-organizational determinants have statistically significant impact on the intrapreneurship activities of the firms. These environmental and organizational determinants are environmental munificence, internal communication, formal control, managerial supports and organizational values. On the other hand, it is also shown that there is a positive relationship between intrapreneurship and financial performance of the firm in terms of profitability and growth. Moreover, test results also reveal that there is a significant positive relationship between intrapreneurship and non-financial firm performance in terms of employee and customer satisfaction