The role of organizational trust in the relationship between perceived organizational support and intrapreneur behavior

Organizations are forced to achieve sustainable competitive advantage due to rapidly changing environmental conditions caused by globalization. One of the most important factors to obtain sustainable competitive advantage is the entrepreneurial characteristics of organizations. Organization's entrepreneurial competence is based on entrepreneurial activities of each employee on behalf of organization. This phenomenon is called as intrapreneurship. Clarifying the concept and antecedents of intrapreneurship is crucial for business administration. However, there is a lack of discussion about the individual entrepreneurial activities on behalf of the firm that is called intrapreneurship as a part of the firm level entrepreneurship. The main reasons are the lack of concensus over the concept of intrapreneurship and the measurement problems of this phenomenon. The aim of this study is to make a more explicit intrapreneurship concept and to explore the relationships between the intrapreneur behavior and perceived organizational support and organizational trust which are seen as the antecedents of intrapreneur behavior. Hence in the first stage of the study, the intrapreneur behavior scale has been developed to overcome measurement problems and in the latter stage the hypotheses about the two antecedents of intrapreneur behavior have been tested. In the measurement development stage, an item pool has been formed with the aid of experts on this concept and afterwards this pool has been tested at the certificated R&D centers on 182 employees. The developed scale has six dimensions: innovative work behaviour, championing, information gathering, competitiveness, proactiveness and taking initiative. To test the explanatory model, data which has been gathered from 162 employees working for the companies registered in technology development areas has been analyzed to examine the role of organizational trust in the relationship between perceived organizational support and intrapreneur behavior. Organizational trust is fully mediating the relationship between perceived organizational support and three dimensions of intrapreneur behaviour which are innovative work behavior, championing and information gathering.