Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-1-2016
Abstract
Small to medium sized firms are an important yet understudied context of business in the US. Most research on smaller firms centers on the entrepreneurial aspects of such firms and ignore other possible explanation for small firm success. Organizational culture has been shown in separate studies to positively impact firm outcomes but the combination of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and firm culture has rarely been tested. We conducted an inquiry into the effects of both EO and cultural attributes of small firms by surveying 220 individuals working in small firms in a variety of capacities. What we found was that while EO does play a role, organizational learning has significant explanatory power as to why firms innovate even when EO is absent and combined with play and empowerment increase the predictive power of small firm innovation when EO is present. This contributes to the literature in extending small firm inquiry beyond EO and linking it with culture and conveys the message for practitioners that small firms need not be entrepreneurial in order to innovate provided they inspire culture building such as playfulness, empowerment, and learning.
Keywords
business enterprises--small, business enterprises--medium, entrepreneurship, Weatherhead School of Management, small to medium-sized enterprises, SME, entrepreneurial orientation, empowerment, playfulness, learning, culture
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Chambers, Donald G., "Culture: For Small to Medium Sized Enterprises it Enhances Entrprenurial Orientation" (2016). Student Scholarship. 155.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/155