Modelling the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, organizational integration, and programme performance in local sustainability

ABSTRACT

Empirical analyses testing the impacts of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) remain lacking in public sector research despite strong normative expectations for public managers to foster a culture of innovativeness, risk-taking, proactiveness, and accountability in their organizations. Drawing data from a nationwide survey of the US local governments, this research uses structural equation modelling to examine relationships between EO, organizational integration processes, and performance in the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) programme. The study finds that EO positively influences programme performance, but does so indirectly by enhancing knowledge sharing, interorganizational collaboration, and performance information use. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurial orientation
• local government
• public organizations
• sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The findings of Alonso, Clifton, and Díaz-Fuentes (2015) did suggest, however, that administrative decentralization led to a reduction in public sector size in terms of expenditures but not employment.

2. This study is unable to account for the possibility of nonresponse bias. Local governments with better programme performance and a stronger EO may have been more likely to respond, which could bias the results. However, the average scores across the items for EO and EECBG performance indicate moderate levels reported, on average, so bias may not be problematic at least in this respect.

3. Some items appeared highly skewed and leptokurtic based on an examination of histograms. Moreover, several items had skewness and kurtosis values exceeding +1.0, suggesting violation of univariate normality and thus multivariate normality.

4. The model was bootstrapped 5,000 times with WLSMV in Mplus.

5. This insight was suggested by one anonymous reviewer.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems: [1444745]; NSF Division of Social and Economic Sciences: [1127992].

Notes on contributors

William L. Swann

William L. Swann is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. His research focuses on local government, public management, and urban sustainability, and has been published in the Journal of Urban Affairs and The American Review of Public Administration. He joins the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver as an assistant professor in the fall of 2016.