銷售員組織內部創業行為的機理分析與實證研究：基於家庭動機視角的研究

Abstract

Faced with an increasingly complex and rapidly changing environment, companies need to innovate quickly and continuously to cope with the risks and to identify new opportunities brought by environmental changes in a timely manner. The traditional innovation model emphasizes the vision of top management and the responsibility of innovation department. For example, radical changes are assumed to be initiated by entrepreneurial spirit of entrepreneurs. The identification and utilization of opportunities are regarded as the responsibility of executives. Innovation is considered as the work of the R&D elites. However, the decision-making chain under this model is too long, which reduces the company's response speed to the external market and makes it difficult to produce innovations that truly meet changing market demands. The entrepreneurial behavior of employees has become a key driving force for the organization's continuous innovation, which can make full use of the advantages of front-line employees to access the market and master market knowledge, and encourage them proactive in conceiving and identifying innovative opportunities, and then taking risks to promote the realization of new opportunities.

Although the entrepreneurial behavior of employees is increasingly important in practice, such practices are also faced with many challenges. First, from the organization’s perspective, the company wants employees to develop and take advantage of new opportunities within the organization to promote organizational vitality. However, the exploration of new opportunities requires autonomy, and decentralization of employees can easily get out of control, diverge from the company’s strategy, and even harm the company’s interests. Moreover, once employees recognize market opportunities, they may leave the company to start their own businesses and become competitors. Second, from the employee’s perspective, opportunity recognition and entrepreneurial behavior are mostly future-oriented rather than present. In many cases, colleagues do not understand the benefits of these behaviors, but they are more sensitive to challenges by changes in the status quo. In such case, the entrepreneurial behavior of employees will be considered as breaking the rules and challenging the work norms, and even disgusted by colleagues and even leaders. Therefore, for employees, entrepreneurial behavior often means changing the status quo, leaving the comfort zone, and facing great risks.

Summarizing the existing literature, the current research on entrepreneurial behavior mainly focuses on entrepreneurs or managers, and there is little research on employee entrepreneurial behavior, which leads us to have little understanding on the process mechanism of employee entrepreneurial behavior. In particular, the front-line sales staff directly deal with the market, and thus, their entrepreneurial behavior is critical to the company's development. At the same time, the sales staff is different from the general staff. They are often stationed outside the company to carry out sales business, and it is difficult for the company to monitor its daily behavior well. Therefore, the front-line sales staff are often a frequent occurrence of various "agent problems". What is the motivation of entrepreneurial behavior for sales staff? How can they better identify opportunities from the market? And how to control and coordinate employee entrepreneurial behavior and company interests? Although the above questions are very important, they cannot be answered by existing literature.

This paper discusses the effect of a long-neglected motivation factor-family motivation on opportunity recognition and entrepreneurial behavior. Compared with entrepreneurs and organizational executives, family support is often an important motivation for front-line employees. Recent studies have begun to focus on the impact of family motivation on employees' work, but no literature has examined how employees' family motivation affects their entrepreneurial behavior at work. Therefore, this study introduces the concept of family motivation to reveal the process of employees' entrepreneurial behavior in the context of salespeople. Specifically, this study focuses on the following four issues: First, whether and how employees’ family motivation could affect their entrepreneurial behavior through the identification of new opportunities; Second, customer orientation helps employees to establish a close relationship with customers and provides market knowledge for identifying opportunities. The combination of family motivation and customer orientation can better promote the identification of new opportunities. Therefore, we explored whether customer orientation will moderate the relationship between family motivation and opportunity recognition. Third, the responsibility of supporting the family will not only affect the work effort of employees, but also affect their behavior choices. For example, the employees may gain the benefits for family at the expense of organizational benefits. Therefore, organizational commitment may help employees synergy family interests and organizational interests. Therefore, we also explored whether the organizational identity will moderate the relationship between family motivation and opportunity recognition. 

To test the theoretical framework of this study, we conducted empirical research on sales personnel. Sales staff deal directly with the market, and their entrepreneurial behaviors are critical to the company's innovative development. Using two waves, multi-source survey data from 280 salespeople, we find that family motivation promotes employees’ entrepreneurial behavior by enhancing their opportunity recognition. Further, we also find that customer orientation and organizational identification positively moderate the relationship between family motivation and opportunity recognition. This study has important theoretical contributions to the fields of family motivation, opportunity recognition, and entrepreneurial behavior. It also has practical significance for organizations to promote frontline employees' entrepreneurial behavior and opportunity recognition.

Date of Award	27 Aug 2020
Original language	Chinese (Traditional)
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Haibin YANG (Supervisor), Jane YANG (Supervisor) & Junchen Hu (External Supervisor)