Research On The Influence Mechanisms Of Coworkers' Entrepreneurial Performance On Employee Entrepreneurship Intention

Under the background of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation",the phenomenon of employee entrepreneurship has been paid close attention by the government,entrepreneurs,researchers and the general public,and has become a hot social issue.On this basis,it is common that numerous employees in the same firm leave their jobs one after another to start their own business.Whether employee entrepreneurship of focal one will be affected by employee entrepreneurship of his coworkers?What kind of coworkers will lead to focal employee entrepreneurship?How does coworkers' entrepreneurship trigger the employee entrepreneurship intention and behavior of focal employee?Unlike other forms of entrepreneurship,employee entrepreneurship is easily accompanied by unethical behaviors of entrepreneurs,which can affect the survival and development of parent firms.Hence,employee entrepreneurship may become a threat and challenge for the parent firms,causing the parent firms' negative attitudes to the employee entrepreneurship.What role does the parent firms' different attitudes play in the process of coworkers'entrepreneurship on focal employee entrepreneurship?How did the different attitudes of the parent firms come into being?These questions are the key to explain the phenomenon of successive employee entrepreneurship,but they have not been satisfactorily answered in the previous literature.By integrating social learning theory and event system theory,this study identifies that co worker' entrepreneurial performance is the prerequisite for the interpersonal influence of employee entrepreneurship,which provides a powerful theoretical explanation for the above issues.Meanwhile,this study reveals the influence mechanism of coworkers'entrepreneurial performance on employee entrepreneurship intention by exploring the mediating role of employee entrepreneurial self-efficacy and employee job embeddedness in the interpersonal influence.Moreover,as the third party of interpersonal influence of employee entrepreneurship,parent hostility will play a buffer role in the interpersonal influence.This study further points out that the unethical behaviors of departing coworkers arouse the deontic injustice perception of parent firms,which lead to parent hostility.As a whole,this paper includes three studies.Study 1 explores a dual-path theoretical mechanism of how entrepreneurial performance influences employee entrepreneurship intention from the perspectives of social learning theory and event system theory.Interpersonal influence mechanism is the key to uncover how employee entrepreneurship spreads in the organization.Employee may imitate their coworkers because of the high entrepreneurial performance of coworkers,however,the imitation effect can not fully explain the interpersonal influence mechanism.The evolution process of employee entrepreneurship events provides a useful supplementary explanation for interpersonal influence mechanism.Through the analysis of 357 questionnaires,the results show that coworkers' entrepreneurial performance is positively correlated with employee entrepreneurship intention and that coworkers' entrepreneurial performance affects employee entrepreneurship intention through the mediating role of employee entrepreneurial self-efficacy and employee job embeddedness.Study 2 explores the moderating effect of parent hostility on the dual-path theoretical mechanism.Although the mechanism of interpersonal influence of employee entrepreneurship has been unfolded,the boundary conditions for the application of the dual-path mechanism is still unclear.Based on the analysis of 217 questionnaires matched at two time points,the results of study 1 are duplicated in study 2,and what's more,study 2 further shows that the parent hostility plays a buffer role in the dual-path theoretical mechanism of interpersonal influence.Study 3 explores the formation process of parent hostility from deontic justice theory.Parent hostility often occurs in the context of employee entrepreneurship,and plays an important role in interpersonal influence.However,it is not clear how parent firm hostility is generated.Using situational experiment method,224 and 310 data were collected from the perspective of employee and top manager respectively.The results show that coworkers' unethical behaviors in the process of entrepreneurship positively predict parent hostility via the mediating role parent firms' deontic injustice perception,and that the magnitude of consequences of coworkers' entrepreneurship positively moderates the mediating role of deontic injustice perception of parent firms.By combining the theoretical perspectives of psychology and management,this study focuses on the interpersonal influence mechanism of employee entrepreneurship,the role of parent hostility and its formation process,which expands the cross-disciplinary integration of employee entrepreneurship research.Specifically,the main innovations and contributions of this study are as follows:(1)This study points out that entrepreneurial performance rather than employee entrepreneurship itself is a prerequisite for the interpersonal influence of employee entrepreneurship.By distinguishing the different effects of entrepreneurial performance on interpersonal influence of employee entrepreneurship,this study expands the cause of formation of interpersonal influence mechanism from two theoretical lens,and provides a new way of studying employee entrepreneurship.(2)This study comprehensively analyzes and compares the two theoretical mechanisms of interpersonal influence of employee entrepreneurship through integrating social learning theory and event system theory,which enriches and expands the application fields of social learning theory and event system theory.(3)This study highlights the role of parent firms' attitudes towards the ethical characteristics of employee entrepreneurship.Employee entrepreneurship are often accompanied with unethical behaviors,and it has been considered that parent firms' attitudes towards unethical behaviors are basically neutral.By emphasizing the moderating effect of parent hostile attitude on the process of social learning and event evolution,this study clarifies the boundary condition of social learning theory and event system theory.(4)This study explores the formation process of parent hostility with deontic justice theory,reveals the process of how unethical behavior leads to parent hostility.And the perspective of deontic justice is essentially different from the previous research of parent hostility,which provides a new avenue of studying parent hostility.