Strategic entrepreneurial behaviors: Construct and scale development

• Author: Jeffrey S. Hornsby,Brian S. Anderson,Yoshihiro Eshima
• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1306
• Published date: 01 June 2019

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Strategic entrepreneurial behaviors: Construct

and scale development

Brian S. Anderson

1,2

| Yoshihiro Eshima

3

| Jeffrey S. Hornsby

1

1

Bloch School of Management, University of

Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri

2

Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

3

Faculty of Business Administration, Osaka

University of Economics, Osaka, Japan

Correspondence

Brian S. Anderson, Bloch School of

Management, University of Missouri, Kansas

City MO 64110-2446.

Email: andersonbri@umkc.edu

Funding information

Osaka University of Economics; Scientific

Research(C), Grant/Award Number:

15 K03700

Research Summary:Delineating between conservative and entre-

preneurial firms to discern the causes, consequences, and benefits

of entrepreneurial behavior is a key conversation in strategic entre-

preneurship research. We introduce to this conversation a new

construct, Strategic Entrepreneurship Behaviors, which we argue

provides several theoretical and practical benefits to scholars

exploring strategic entrepreneurship phenomenon. We develop

and validate a measurement model for the Strategic Entrepreneur-

ship Behaviors construct using a three-study design in Japan and in

the United States. To facilitate reproducibility and replication of

our results, we posted all data, R code, and Supporting Information

on the Open Science Framework website available at https://osf.io/

rqw5u/.

Managerial Summary:The driving question in strategic entrepre-

neurship research is the impact of an organization's entrepreneurial

activity on its performance. Answering this and related questions

requires careful measurement of entrepreneurial activity. Existing

measures and scales served the field well, but to answer questions

establishing causal relationships, we need new constructs and mea-

sures robust to causal research designs. We introduce a new con-

struct and scale, Strategic Entrepreneurial Behaviors, to capture the

firm's exploitation of new product-market opportunities through

the intended commercialization of its product innovations. We

hope this new measure for a firm's entrepreneurial activity allows

researchers to build more predictive theory, and to ask—and

answer—new research questions that move the strategic entrepre-

neurship conversation forward.

KEYWORDS

construct development, entrepreneurial behaviors,

entrepreneurial orientation, strategic entrepreneurship, structural

equation modeling

Received: 25 August 2017 Revised: 24 August 2018 Accepted: 30 October 2018 Published on: 21 November 2018

DOI: 10.1002/sej.1306

© 2018 Strategic Management Society

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. 2019;13:199–220. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sej 199

1|INTRODUCTION

Firm performance is the most important outcome in strategic management research (Bettis, Ethiraj, Gambardella,

Helfat, & Mitchell, 2016). While several factors relate to performance in a meaningful way, it is widely accepted that

behaving entrepreneurially is an important predictor of performance within—and between—firms (Rauch, Wiklund,

Lumpkin, & Frese, 2009). Most scholars now agree that, all other things being equal, businesses that consistently

exhibit entrepreneurial behaviors outperform conservatively managed peers (Rosenbusch, Brinckmann, & Bausch,

2011). The strategic entrepreneurship literature provides ample empirical evidence generally agreeing that it pays to

be entrepreneurial (Ireland, Hitt, & Sirmon, 2003).

A critical part of this conversation is the constructs we use to delineate entrepreneurial firms. The question of

what makes a firm entrepreneurial, and what does it mean to be entrepreneurial, lies at the heart of strategic entre-

preneurship research (Wright & Hitt, 2017). These constructs help scholars identify the causes, consequences, bene-

fits, and limitations of being an entrepreneurial firm (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011; Covin & Wales, 2012). In short,

constructs tapping this domain are central to the field, and central to answering the questions we ask as strategic

entrepreneurship scholars.

To this conversation, we introduce the Strategic Entrepreneurial Behaviors construct. Strategic Entrepreneurial

Behaviors (SEBs) is the firm's exploitation of new product-market opportunities through the intended commercializa-

tion of its product innovations. SEBs capture what it means for a firm to exhibit a sustained behavioral tendency to

engage in product/market entrepreneurial activity. Our conceptualization of SEBs is similar to the firm's entrepre-

neurial orientation (EO)—a firm's innovative, proactive, and risk-taking behaviors and operating philosophies

(Anderson, Covin, & Slevin, 2009; Covin & Slevin, 1991). Unlike EO, however, SEBs isolate only the behavioral ele-

ments to the firm's strategic activities that directly place the firm in new product/market domains.

The value of our paper rests on two key assumptions. We first assume that the broader the construct, the more

dimensions it has, and the more indicators that are used to measure it, the more likely it is to be misspecified

(Bagozzi, 2011). Conceptually broad multidimensional constructs allow scholars to ask broader questions

(MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Podsakoff, 2011), but breadth comes at the expense of depth and precision (Edwards &

Berry, 2010). Isolating causal relationships and building predictive theory requires confidence that what the

researcher conceptualized aligns with what the researcher measured (Bagozzi, 2011). Building predictive theory also

requires minimizing measurement error (Loken & Gelman, 2017). Measurement error is a serious threat—

measurement error causes endogeneity, which causes bias in model estimates (Antonakis, Bendahan, Jacquart, & Lal-

ive, 2010). For papers testing entrepreneurship theory, the strength of a paper's contribution to science and to prac-

tice depends on well-specified measurement models and high quality measures (Bagozzi, 2011).

Our second assumption builds from the preceding—improving the quality of the measures of strategic entrepre-

neurial activity is not simply a matter of reconceptualizing existing constructs or tweaking existing measures

(Anderson, Kreiser, Kuratko, Hornsby, & Eshima, 2015; George & Marino, 2011), but requires new construct concep-

tualizations and new measurement models. The challenge for strategic entrepreneurship researchers is to derive new

constructs that capture similar nomological relationships to our existing constructs, but do so with more reliable mea-

sures that are easier to specify in causal models. As dealing with endogeneity and other threats to causal inference

become de facto standards for publishing research in top entrepreneurship journals, existing constructs that are diffi-

cult to use in instrument variable and related research designs have demonstrably lower usefulness for entrepreneur-

ship researchers. As we will demonstrate, SEBs perform a substantially similar nomological role as the existing EO

construct, but does so with a more reliable measurement model and one that is easier to use in research designs

meant to recover causal parameter estimates.

The target audience for our paper is strategic entrepreneurship scholars who are familiar with EO and theoretical

questions associated with EO research, but who are struggling with ongoing debates over EO's dimensionality and

measurement (Anderson et al., 2015; Covin & Wales, 2012), and who find it difficult to use existing EO measures in

200 ANDERSON ET AL.