Recent studies have identified several antecedents to employee innovation, such as jobcharacteristics (Oldham & Cummings, 1996), positive affect (Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, &Staw, 2005), the relationship between employees and their supervisors (Janssen & VanYperen, 2004), and the social context (Munton & West, 1995). By focusing on the individualskills required to become an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship researchers maintain thatentrepreneurs require the skills and experience to combine tangible and intangible assets innew ways and to deploy them to better meet customer needs (Amit, Glosten, & Muller, 1990).Entrepreneurial abilities therefore enable individuals to demonstrate innovative,entrepreneurial behavior. Likewise, companies need employees with entrepreneurial abilitiesto innovate in the corporate context (Shabana, 2010). Nevertheless, while prior research hasdeveloped insights into how employees become innovative in the corporate context, we lackempirical insights into how firms can attract, retain, and nurture entrepreneurial employees tofoster corporate entrepreneurship and innovation.Therefore, this paper addresses this issue by investigating how firms can attract, retain,and nurture entrepreneurial employees. More specifically, we are interested in howcompanies convince potential employees that their entrepreneurial motivation and abilitiesoffer them the right corporate context, and prevent their current entrepreneurial employeesfrom being attracted by outside opportunities. Owing to the lack of prior research on this
topic, we use qualitative methods to explore the role of corporate structure in providing an
environment that attracts and retains innovative employees.
We conducted an in-depth case study at a German company in the biotechnological
industry. Findings from the case study show that entrepreneurial, innovative employees can
be motivated to join and remain in a company through a specific organization design, the socalled spin-along approach (Michl, Gold, & Picot, 2012; Rohrbeck, Döhler, & Arnold, 2007).
Spin-alongs are separate organizational units that provide entrepreneurial employees with the
necessary flexibility and security (flexicurity) to use their entrepreneurial abilities. However,
they need to be constantly monitored in order to ensure that the venture’s goals are aligned
with the parent company’s strategic goals. We further find that senior management plays a
critical role in balancing the employees’ flexicurity with control.
Our study contributes to the innovation and corporate entrepreneurship literature, as well
as to managerial practice in several ways. First, this study highlights how entrepreneurial
employees can be attracted, retained, and nurtured by a specific organization design, the spinalong approach, that combines elements of internal and external venturing. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first study that shows that the spin-along design is strongly linked to
employees’ entrepreneurial motivation, thereby fostering corporate entrepreneurship. Our
findings support the allegation that the firm context has a critical role to play in motivating
entrepreneurial employees and should thus be better examined (Latham & Pinder, 2004).
Specifically, we provide insights into how companies can attract and retain entrepreneurial
employees, should support them by exploring their entrepreneurial motivation, and motivate
them to use their abilities in the organization. Second, in contrast to most previous studies that
mainly examined how current employees can become more innovative, we also investigate
how entrepreneurial employees can be attracted. Thus, the scope of this study is much wider,
since we examine attracting, retaining, and nurturing entrepreneurial employees. Third, this
study uses an explorative design in a dynamic context; that is, spin-alongs as a processoriented organization design. We further present our case study in a global context; the case
company can be described as a hidden champion (Simon, 1990) in the biotech industry. This
research setting allows us to provide conclusions that have great external validity and offers
insights into the challenge that many hidden champions face in attracting and retaining
valuable human capital.
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