An Empirical Exploration Of Corporate Entrepreneurial Orientation In Bihor County Romania

According to Schumpeter (1934) an entrepreneur is an individual who innovates and creates new combinations. Today entrepreneurship refers to a process of opportunity recognition and pursuit that leads to growth. It assumes an opportunistic approach to opportunities. It bears risks and it is associated with innovation’ (Hsu et al., 2011). Last two decades have witness the birth of entrepreneurship at organizational level or corporate entrepreneurship (Sciascia and Bettinelli, 2013). Greblikaite and Krisciunas (2012) have identifies the main features that compound the modern entrepreneurship in an enterprise. According to them corporate entrepreneurship has four main components: (a) economic activity, (b) managerial activity, (c) social – cohesion activity and (d) technological and environmental activity. As an economic activity corporate entrepreneurship assumes the framework of the resource – based and transaction – costs theories, focusing on eliminating transaction costs within existing constraints in order to maximize profitability (Antoncic and Prodan, 2008). Striving for profitability, effectiveness, competitiveness, risks management, value and jobs creation are several indicators measuring the construct named economic activity (Greblikaite and Krisciunas, 2012). A second construct underlines that corporate entrepreneurship has a managerial dimension. Consequently entrepreneurs must focus on innovation, knowledge creation, team work and networking. With the advent of the new EU social cohesion policy, corporate entrepreneurship is characterized by responsiveness to different shareholders, including the society and by ‘friendliness to problematic social groups’ (Greblikaite and Krisciunas, 2012, p. 527). Finally appliance of technological and scientific research and focusing on renewable resources are the indicators of a forth component of corporate entrepreneurship, named Technological and Environmental activity. Synthetizing, the literature on corporate entrepreneurship identifies a central construct measuring the corporate entrepreneurship, named entrepreneurial orientation (EO). The multidimensionality of corporate entrepreneurship is reduced to a construct having only three dimensions: innovation, proactiveness and risk taking (Zahra and Nielson, 2002). For the purpose of this study principal component analysis has been chosen to conduct an exploratory analysis of the validity of scales used to measure the three dimensions of EO of firms in Bihor County.Factor scores have afterwards been used to bring empirical evidence supporting the positive effect of EO on organizational performance.