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Time allocation behaviours of entrepreneurs: the impact of individual entrepreneurial orientation

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Abstract

This paper contributes to scholarly conversations on the allocation of entrepreneurs’ time in entrepreneurial ventures. I study the influence of entrepreneurs’ individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) on their time allocation behaviours. I formulate a series of hypotheses about the impact of IEO dimensions—innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking—on the allocation of entrepreneurs’ time to (1) strategic versus operational activities and (2) scheduled versus unscheduled meetings. I test these hypotheses using data on 213 entrepreneurs from Italian entrepreneurial ventures. The findings indicate that proactiveness and risk-taking are associated with specific time allocation behaviours.

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Notes

  1. I define an entrepreneurial venture as a young owner-managed firm that is established by one entrepreneur (or more) who “perceives an opportunity, and creates an organization to pursue it” (Bygrave and Hofer 1991: 14).

  2. I recognize that in an entrepreneurial venture managed by a team of entrepreneurs, hierarchical relationships may exist among the entrepreneurs (Alvarez and Barney 2005). One of the entrepreneurs may be appointed at the top of the hierarchy and may decide whether to delegate activities to subordinate entrepreneurs and which activities are to be delegated. However, owning a non-negligible share of the firm’s production means grants subordinate entrepreneurs decision authority and allows these latter to bargain with the top of the hierarchy the activities that they have to perform.

  3. The IEO construct has been developed by transferring the firm-level construct of entrepreneurial orientation, that measures a firm attitude towards entrepreneurship (Covin and Slevin 1986; Lumpkin and Dess 1996), to the individual level of analysis (Kollmann et al. 2007; Bolton and Lane 2012). Despite Lumpkin and Dess (1996) conceptualized entrepreneurial orientation as having five dimensions—innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, competitive aggressiveness and autonomy—the scholars who first conceptualized this firm-level construct considered only the first three dimensions (Covin and Slevin 1986, 1989, 1991; Miller 1983; Zahra 1991). The IEO construct is based on this previously consolidated construct and typically includes only the three dimensions that I consider here (Kropp et al. 2008).

  4. The research team involved in the EVA project decided to focus on the ventures founded by alumni from PoliMI because, ceteris paribus, the alumni who were still venture entrepreneurs at the time of survey administration, might have been more willing to participate in a survey administered by PoliMI researchers than entrepreneurs having no ties to PoliMI. However, it is worth acknowledging that, despite the large majority of the entrepreneurs who participated in the survey (i.e., 57 percent) were PoliMI alumni, many respondents were not PoliMI alumni. In 37 percent of the cases, the alumnus who founded the venture had already left it, while in the remaining 6 percent of the cases, the alumnus was still an owner-manager, but the answers to survey questions were provided by another entrepreneur.

  5. There is no agreement in the literature as to the age threshold beyond which a firm ceases to be considered an “entrepreneurial venture”. The thresholds used by the previous studies vary between 5 and 25 years. Here, I use a 10 year threshold.

  6. Because the distribution by industry and geographical area of sample ventures differed from that of the target population [χ2(3) = 0.01; χ2(4) = 0.07, respectively], I checked the robustness of the results discussed below by re-estimating the models using two distinct sets of sampling weights. These two sets of weights denote the inverse of the probability that each venture was included in the sample because of its industry and location, respectively. The results of these estimates are in line with those presented the following. For the sake of synthesis, these additional estimates are not reported here, but they are available from the author upon request.

  7. Note that focusing on meetings with insiders is particularly appropriate for the purposes of the present study. Indeed, even the entrepreneurs who have a preference for unscheduled versus scheduled meetings may find it difficult to interact with venture outsiders (e.g., investors, alliance partners, customers and/or suppliers) for a substantial amount of time without timely scheduling a meeting. Conversely, they can take advantage of co-location of insiders in the workplace and quite easily set up unscheduled meetings with them. Therefore, if I did not focus on meetings with insiders, I would probably overestimate the time allocated to scheduled versus unscheduled meetings for the entrepreneurs who more frequently interact with outsiders.

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Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to Beatrice Matassini for her research assistance. The author is grateful for useful comments and suggestions to two anonymous referees. Responsibility for any errors lies solely with the author.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: The steps of the data collection process

In January 2015, the research team involved in the EVA project (hereafter, the EVA team) identified the target population of entrepreneurial ventures to which the online survey would have been administered. The EVA team started from the population of 3096 firms founded by at least one alumnus of Politecnico di Milano who graduated between 2002 and 2010. Then, the EVA team excluded the firms (1) established before 2004, because they had more than 10 years at 31/12/2014, (2) controlled by another business organization either at foundation or at 31/12/2014 and/or (3) that had already ceased operations or were in process of doing it. The remaining 1,889 entrepreneurial ventures constitute the target population. For these firms, the EVA team searched for an email and/or telephone contact using the AIDA database (i.e., the version of the Amadeus-Bureau Van Dijk dataset that focuses on Italian firms) and ventures’ websites, whenever the team could find them. The EVA team found contact information for 1075 ventures, that constitute the contacted population.

Between February and March 2015, the EVA team developed a structured questionnaire to be administered to one of the entrepreneurs in target ventures. In developing the questionnaire, the EVA team combined insights from the literatures on time allocation behaviours of (owner-)managers and organizational design, with insights from seven preliminary case studies on Italian entrepreneurial ventures that the team had conducted in the previous months. The questionnaire included, among many others, questions on (1) the time allocation behaviours of ventures’ entrepreneurs at 31/12/2004, (2) the dimensions of IEO and a series of additional individual characteristics of these entrepreneurs (namely, gender, role and seniority in the focal venture), and (3) a series of firm-specific characteristics (e.g., whether the target venture was family-owned, whether it had been funded by a professional investor). To pilot test the questions, in April 2015 five entrepreneurs from five entrepreneurial ventures not affiliated with the firms included in the target population were asked to fill in the questionnaire and to comment on the appropriateness of its wording and length. On the basis of their comments, the questionnaire was simplified and some questions were modified.

In May 2015, the EVA team pre-tested the questionnaire on a sample of 100 entrepreneurial ventures randomly extracted from the target population. A short presentation of the EVA project and a request to participate in this project by answering a questionnaire were sent to the contact email address of the 100 ventures. In this introductory email, the EVA team provided the link to the online survey and clearly explained that the questions were to be answered by (one of) the entrepreneur(s). Only 10 (at least partially) filled questionnaires were obtained (i.e., 10% response rate). To understand the reasons of this low response rate, the EVA team conducted some phone calls with entrepreneurs in non-responding ventures. These calls revealed that the introductory emails had been rarely read by the ventures’ entrepreneurs. Therefore, a different contact methodology was chosen: the introductory email was replaced by a phone call conducted by trained research assistants. During this call the research assistants asked to speak with the venture CEO, described her the purpose and importance of the EVA project and requested the CEO both to participate herself in the research and to ask any remaining entrepreneurs within the focal venture to participate too. If the CEO agreed, the research assistants immediately sent her an email providing the link to the online survey.

The survey was conducted between June and December 2015. Whenever a questionnaire was filled, answers were checked for internal coherence by the research assistants. In several cases, phone follow-up interviews were conducted with respondent entrepreneurs to obtain missing data and ensure that collected data were reliable.

Appendix 2

See Table 8.

Table 8 Percentage of entrepreneurs’ work time allocated to strategic activities and scheduled meetings with insiders: check of robustness

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Piva, E. Time allocation behaviours of entrepreneurs: the impact of individual entrepreneurial orientation. Econ Polit Ind 45, 493–518 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40812-018-0105-1

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