Entrepreneurial Orientation of the Companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Importance of Contextual Factors

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) represents a firm-level construct that captures innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking of the existing companies. The main focus of this paper is to present the EO of 477 companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to compare EO between companies operating within different contextual factors. We used descriptive statistics and statistical testing to draw conclusions. Our paper presents the mean values of entrepreneurial orientation for each NACE industry category. In addition, our results confirm that there are statistically significant differences in entrepreneurial orientation between (a) the companies operating in a more competitive environment and the companies operating in a less competitive environment; (b) the companies with acquired ISO certificates and high level of TQM practices and the companies without ISO certificates and low level of TQM practices; (c) the companies operating in predominantly export-oriented markets and the companies operating in predominantly local markets; and finally (d) the companies located in Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the companies located in Republic of Srpska. However, there are no statistically significant differences in entrepreneurial orientation between the older companies (older than two, five and ten years) and younger companies; nor between companies of different sizes. By analyzing organizational contextual factors, this paper identifies key variables that may play an important role in designing more complex structural models. Additionally, this paper presents the current state of entrepreneurial orientation of existing companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina.