EO measurement

There has been developed various instruments of measuring EO, of which most widely used is one developed by Miller/Covin and Slevin (1989), also called as M/CS scale

(Covin & Wales, 2011). The M/CS and its variants have been continuously used to bring forth new theoretically interesting findings (Covin & Wales, 2011). Although using M/CS scale or any other pre-existing EO scale was not option in this study for the reason that the author formed an own EO scale of the questions used in “Benchmark for a great workplace” –survey⁴, M/CS scale and other pre-existing scales served as valuable exemplars in providing understanding of proper ways to measure EO.

Measuring EO in this study was different also in another way than just using a self-established set of survey items. EO, as a concept capturing organizations strategy-making practices and managerial philosophies, is generally assessed by asking of the attitudes of executives or other individuals participating in strategic work. However, in this study, instead of surveying the executives of the organization, ordinary level employees were being studied. Surveying executives would had been logical also due to the fact that it is them who set an example of expected behavior as well as are responsible in communicating an entrepreneurial strategic vision and bringing about the pro-entrepreneurial organizational culture (Kuratko, Horsnby and Bishop, 2005).

Viewed in this light, executives have important first-hand information of the level of entrepreneurial posture of the firm. As the employees were surveyed in this study, the focus was given to what extent the employees perceive EO to be part of their organization’s work environment.

While studying employee perceptions instead of managerial attitudes poses a different approach with a risk of not being able to fully capture the manager’s intentions, it also offers an opportunity to get a view on how the firm strategy is understood by the employees. It can be reasoned that entrepreneurial strategy is of less value to the firm if the employees do not understand entrepreneurial behavior being encouraged and thus, do not feel prompted towards such behavior. Consequently, assessing the employee perception of whether, e.g. autonomy is encouraged in the firm, gives important information of the firm’s entrepreneurial posture. Indeed, it has been found that individuals on different levels of an organizations hierarchy have different perceptions of the organizations’ identity (Corley, 2004) and also express different perceptions of firm level entrepreneurship (Hornsby, Kuratko, Zahra, 2002). In a study by Monsen and Boss (2009), in which used M/CS scale was used with two groups, managers and staff, it was found that all nine of the survey items measuring three EO dimensions received significantly higher values for managers than for staff. This finding also

4 In Finnish: Hyvän työpaikan kriteerit

suggest that entrepreneurial firm intentions may not be understood in a similar manner by its employees as what the firm strategy makers have intended.

Firm’s strategic guidelines represented in speech or a written plan may not always come to fruition as they were intended. Although autonomy would be promoted in the annual report in the written message of the CEO, it may also result into just “good speech”. Thus, examining the actual perceptions of the employees can provide important view on how EO is actually understood to be part of the work environment.

Additional reasons to study the perceptions of employees can be found in the fact that staff nurses and nurses in leadership have been found to differ in their views to what constitutes a healthy work environment (Kramer and Schmalenberg, 2008). Further, it is claimed that only staff nurses can confirm to whether the strategies adopted result into healthy work environment (Kramer and Schmalenberg, 2008).

The selection of the EO questions started with a subjective selection of potentially usable questions. Out of the 63 questions used in the survey, I found fourteen, which I thought to be appropriate items to measure one of the three EO areas. These fourteen selected items were then included in the exploratory factor analysis in order to explore how data would go along with my subjective assessment. In this respect, the face validity of the items was assessed already prior to the statistical tests, although it was also re-evaluated after the exploratory factor analysis when the factors were formed based on data. Out of these fourteen questions, ultimately 10 questions remained and constituted the final measuring instruments. Both innovativeness and autonomy ended up having four appropriate items to measure them while proactiveness had two. A more thorough description of the questions and their selection process is described below in section 4.3.4.

4.3.2. Job satisfaction

Job satisfaction has been substantially studied in academics (Judge & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2012) and there are multiple different methods to study employee attitudes, such as conducting focus groups, interviewing employees or conducting employee surveys. Of the methods mentioned, the most accurate measure is understood to be well-constructed employee attitude survey (Saari & Judge, 2004). The survey used by Finnish Nurses includes 11 items, which measure perceived rewards of the work. Three of these items were subjectively seen appropriate for measuring work satisfaction and were included in the exploratory factor analysis. The three chosen items were seen to

measure whether the employee experiences “pleasurable or positive emotional state” in the work environment (Locke 1976:1304).