An evaluation of the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and success of automotive companies from selected Sub-Sahara African countries
Abstract
The study evaluated the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and the success of automotive organisations across Sub-Sahara Africa. Corporate entrepreneurship is regarded as the umbrella term that integrates all aspects of entrepreneurship that occur inside the existing organisation, for example, entrepreneurial orientation, strategic entrepreneurship, corporate venturing and intrapreneurship. Corporate entrepreneurship can decidedly influence an organisation’s capacity to compete, improve competitive positioning, transform industries and markets whenever value creation innovations are developed and exploited. However, there is no specified scientific stable measurement instrument or tool to measure the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and the success of organisations.
This study developed an empirical measurement instrument using constructs from organisational antecedents, entrepreneurial orientation, corporate entrepreneurship and organisational success factors. Organisational antecedents (top management support, autonomy or work discretion, rewards or reinforcement, time availability and organisational boundaries) were used as independent variables, entrepreneurial orientation and corporate entrepreneurship as mediating variables and organisational success factors as dependent variables in the measurement instrument. The study explained the literature for entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship, organisational success factors which were derived from the Balanced Scorecard and the overview of the automotive industry in Sub-Sahara Africa.
The information utilised in the investigation were gathered from five different countries in six automotive organisations; Kenya (Toyota Kenya), Malawi (Toyota Malawi), South Africa (Toyota Tsusho Africa and Subaru Southern Africa), Zambia (Toyota Zambia) and Zimbabwe (Toyota Zimbabwe). The investigation gathered 429 responses which were vigorously exposed to exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the reliability and construct validity before conducting structural equation modelling analysis. Structural equation modelling was conducted to test the hypothesis of the study and produce a framework which is proposed for this study.
The discoveries of the investigation demonstrated that the measurement instrument was scientifically stable with acceptable construct validity and reliability. The measurement instrument produced the proposed framework of the study which produced evidence of the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and the success of organisations. By and large, findings drawn from the study suggested that top management support, rewards or reinforcement and organisational boundaries were positively related to entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurial orientation was positively related to corporate entrepreneurship. As a result, corporate entrepreneurship activities were also found to be good indicators of the success of organisations. Additionally, new results that were not hypothesised by the study showed that rewards or reinforcement and entrepreneurial orientation were partially directly related to the success factors. As a result, organisations need to promote positive top management support, rewards or reinforcement and organisational boundaries to create entrepreneurial orientation. The existence of entrepreneurial orientation in organisations can create corporate entrepreneurship a good indicator of organisational success.