A Study On The Boundary Conditions Of The Relationship Between Entrepreneurial Orientation And Business Performance

Entrepreneurial orientation is the core concept in the field of entrepreneurship research. In the past thirty years, a large number of literatures paid substantial conceptual and empirical attention on the entrepreneurial orientation. Among them, the key concern is the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and business performance. Early researchers focused on the pure direct relationship between two variables, and then introduced moderators that influence the strength or direction of this relationship, and later explored the mediating mechanisms. So far, massive related literatures have been accumulated. However, there still exist some research issues around entrepreneurial orientation and business performance. For example, bounded by the research design, studies cannot draw a consist conclusion about the true relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and business performance; second, it is not clear how to conceptualize the concept of entrepreneurial orientation, especially for its dimensionality, and appropriate measures is the basis and premise to further understand how entrepreneurial orientation relates to business performance; third, performance is a multidimensional concept and the existing empirical research adopt various measures or indicators, which may lead to different effect of entrepreneurial orientation on business performance.Based on135independent study samples between1990and2012, we undertook a meta-analysis exploring the magnitude of the EO-performance relationship and potential moderators affecting this relationship. Data analysis results indicated that the correlation of EO with performance is moderately large (r=.307) and that this relationship is robust to some factors including entrepreneurial orientation scale choice, national culture dimensions and firm age. But the industry (manufacturing or service), performance measurement (subjective or objective) and the develop degree of a country would exert a significant effect on the relationship between the two focused variables, which indicates that the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and business performance would be influenced by time, space, industry characteristic and performance evaluation standards. In addition, we find that dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation would influence business performance in different degree. Results show that innovativeness(r=0.343) are significantly different from competitive aggressiveness (r=0.216) at the level of p=0.05, and so from risk-taking (r=0.199) at the level of p=0.05. Proactiveness (r=0.323) and autonomy (r=0.106) show a significant difference at the level of p=0.1. This study helps comb the research status of entrepreneurial orientation and recommendations for future research about concept measure, additional moderators and empirical study design are developed based on the results of this study.