家庭動機對員工內創業機會識別的影響研究

Abstract

Innovation-driven has become a national development strategy, and the new technological revolution has also provided significant opportunities for enterprises to achieve breakthroughs and innovations. However, the Sino-US trade and technology war as well as the outbreak of the new crown epidemic have made the development of Chinese enterprises face a high degree of uncertainty, intensified the risk of enterprise innovation and entrepreneurship, and further hindered the transformation and upgrading of Chinese enterprises. In order to cope with the increasingly complex and turbulent external environment, companies need to actively scan the external environment, discover risks in a timely manner from the changing environment, keenly identify opportunities, and respond quickly. The traditional innovation pattern emphasizes the vision of the senior management. The major changes of the company are considered to come from the entrepreneurial spirit of entrepreneurs, and all decision-making information is in the hands of managers. The identification of opportunities is seen as the responsibility of executives. With the advent of the Internet era, information is becoming increasingly flat, employees can grasp more and more information, and innovative organizational mechanisms have undergone fundamental changes. Employee innovation is becoming even more important for the innovation from elites. Activating the entrepreneurial spirit of front-line employees, making full use of their advantages of being close to the market and mastering market knowledge, and encouraging them to actively identify innovation opportunities like entrepreneurs become the key driving force for continuous innovation.

Under the background that the whole society pays more and more attention to the entrepreneurial spirit of enterprises, employee opportunity identification is a reflection of corporate entrepreneurial spirit. Opportunity identification refers to the process that employees actively identify new opportunities that are conducive to the development of the organization when interacting with the external environment. Although employee opportunity identification is increasingly important for quick response to changing external environment, it is a highly challenging activity that not only requires a lot of effort, but also requires high cognitive abilities, which is particularly difficult for frontline employees. First, compared with external entrepreneurs, the internal motivation and passion of front-line employees are greatly reduced, leading to their lack of passion to actively participate in opportunity identification activities; second, compared with managers, front-line employees lack authority and resource allocation power as well as a comprehensive understanding of the internal and external environment of the organization. These cognitive limitations also hinder employees' ability to identify opportunities. Therefore, it is important to study the drivers of employee opportunity identification. However, the current research on entrepreneurial behavior mainly focuses on entrepreneurs or managers, and there is less research on the employee's opportunity identification behavior within the organization, which leads to a limited understanding of the behavioral motivation and process mechanism of employee opportunity identification. What is the motivation for employee identification of opportunities within the organization? How can employees better identify opportunities in the interaction with market? Although the above questions are very important, they cannot be answered by the existing literature.

This thesis discusses the influence of family motivation on employee opportunity identification in intrapreneurship. Family motivation is a new topic in the motivation literatures. For frontline employees, the responsibility of supporting the family is an important motivation for their work. Recent studies have begun to focus on the impact of family motivation on employees’ work, but there is no literature that focuses on how employees’ family motivation affects their opportunity identification at work. Sales personnel deal directly with the market, and they identify opportunities in the market for the company's innovative development. Therefore, in the context of sales employees, this study introduces the variable of family motivation to reveal the process mechanism of employee opportunity identification in intrapreneurship. Specifically, this research mainly studies the following three questions: First, whether is family motivation an influencing factor for employees to actively identify new opportunities within organization; second, what is the process mechanism by which family motivation affects opportunity identification within organization? This article points out that entrepreneurial passion and entrepreneurial imagination are the emotional and cognitive processes in which family motivation affects opportunity identification, thereby revealing the path that family motivation affects employee opportunity identification in intrapreneurship; third, whether can employees’ network ability moderate the relationship between family motivation and employee's opportunity identification in intrapreneurship? Because employees’ network ability is an important factor to build relationship, we also explored whether individual's network capabilities moderate the main effects.

In order to verify the theoretical framework of this research, we collected a two-round, multi-source matching survey data of 280 sales personnel from 18 companies. The results of the study found that family motivation has a positive impact on employees’ entrepreneurial passion, and entrepreneurial passion has a positive impact on opportunity identification in intrapreneurship. Further, three dimensions of entrepreneurial imagination in terms of innovative imagination, social Imagination and practical imagination also have a mediating effect in the relationship between family motivation and opportunity identification in intrapreneurship. Specially, family motivation has a positive impact on social imagination and practical imagination, but has a negative impact on innovative imagination. In addition, network ability has an important moderating effect on the relationship between family motivation and entrepreneurial passion and entrepreneurial imagination. In particular, the network ability positively moderates the relationship between family motivation and entrepreneurial passion, the relationship between family motivation and social imagination, as well as the relationship between family motivation and practical imagination, but no moderating effect on the relationship between family motivation and creative imagination has been found. This article has important theoretical contributions to the fields of family motivation, opportunity identification, and corporate entrepreneurship, and has practical implications for organizations to promote employee entrepreneurship.

Date of Award	22 Dec 2021
Original language	Chinese (Traditional)
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Lihua Huang (External Supervisor) & Zhilin YANG (Supervisor)