Employee Intrapreneurship: Research Frontiers and Prospects

Abstract

Based on their own research purposes, scholars have carried out a variety of interpretations on employee intrepreneurship, resulting in the unclear boundary between concepts and the lack of a unified paradigm. Therefore, based on the framework of “connotation and measurement – driving antecedents – outcome effect”, this paper systematically sorts out and integrates the existing knowledge in the field of employee intrepreneurship and discovers the new knowledge according to the systematic literature review method, and the 127 literatures obtained from the mainstream English databases（e.g. Web of Science）and the China National Knowledge Internet.The conclusions are as follows: Firstly, there are behaviorism and consequentialism in the definition of employee intrepreneurship, which is characterized by organizational context dependence, bottom-up initiative and commercialization of activity. It is different from independent entrepreneurship and part-time entrepreneurship in terms of expected return, risk aversion, entrepreneurial ability perception, business opportunity identification and role characteristics. Secondly, based on the behaviorism and consequentialism, the perception measurement of employee intrepreneurship can be divided into three dimensions and two dimensions, which is difficult to reflect the uniqueness of employee intrepreneurship. Thirdly, employee intrepreneurship includes intention formation, behavior generation and performance realization. The antecedents of these three stages involve employees’ individual characteristics, organizational factors and regional environment. Fourth, intrepreneurship has a dual effect on employees and supporting organizations.The implications are that: Firstly, the dual roles of employee and entrepreneur in time and space point out the direction to identify and cultivate intrepreneurs. Secondly, an organization can start from individual or organizational factors to set off the revolution of work scene driving intrepreneurship. Thirdly, senior managers need to be good at combining the top-down guidance of organizational entrepreneurship with the bottom-up intrepreneurship of employees to achieve the win-win situation.The future directions are that: To dynamically analyze the unique identity construction process of intrepreneurs according to the role theory; to develop the accurate measurement scales for employee intrepreneurship; to reveal the interaction of antecedents of employee intrepreneurship and the chain driven mechanism from intrepreneurial intention, behavior to performance; to explore how the negative effects of employee intrepreneurship can be extended to organization; to explore the new changes and new issues of employee intrepreneurship in the digitalization and platformalization background.The contributions are that: Focusing on identifying the uniqueness of intrepreneurship in the organizational context and regional environment, this paper proposes a holistic framework to drive the intention formation, behavior generation and performance realization of employee intrepreneurship, and refines the outcome effects from intrepreneurial employee and supporting organization, which provides a basis for deepening the research on employee intrepreneurship.