Seminari - Coen Rigtering

Coen Rigtering (Utrecht University) will present his paper “Are Employees Happier in Entrepreneurial Organizations? The Effect of Entrepreneurial Orientation on Employee Well-Being”, joint work with Max Mulhuijzen (Free University Amsterdam); Mathew Hughes (University of Leicester) and Daniel Cowen (Groningen University). 

Abstract 

With the benefits of adopting an entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in terms of firm growth and profitability being firmly established, scholars have begun to explore the broader implications of adopting an entrepreneurial management style. Unfortunately, these broader implications are oftentimes still modeled as financial and how EO creates, strengthens, or weakens firm resources is still unclear. We focus on one of the most important resources that firms have at their disposal, their human capital, and study how EO affects employee well-being. To theorize the relationship between EO and employee well-being, we combine foundational work on EO with the recently developed resource exhaustion perspective. Foundational work allows us to specify under which conditions an increase in EO might generate resources that promote employee well-being. A resource exhaustion perspective allows us to specify the conditions under which EO becomes too explorative and unsustainable from an employee well-being perspective. We test our hypotheses using a panel dataset consisting of S&P500 firms. To proxy EO, we analyze letters to shareholders of S&P500 firms using computer-aided text analysis. To proxy employee well-being, we web scraped over 1 million employee happiness ratings from Indeed.com. Our data shows that an increase in EO leads to higher levels of employee well-being. Yet, a situation in which CEOs rapidly increase the level of EO leads to lower levels of employee well-being. The relationship between EO and employee happiness is positively moderated by the amount of slack resources that a firm has at its disposal and the level of industry dynamism.