Strategic human resource management and inertia in the corporate entrepreneurship of a multinational enterprise

Abstract

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) supports sustained competitive advantage through the continuous exploration and exploitation of new sources of knowledge. With an emphasis on combining knowledge in new configurations, strategic human resource management (HRM) activities are core to these entrepreneurial endeavours. We explore how strategic HRM activities may facilitate and impede CE through a rich, qualitative case study of three local entities within a business unit of a large multinational enterprise facing business stagnation and low levels of corporate entrepreneurship. Responding to a call for more empirical research that probes the subtle and complex interactions between HRM activities and other organisational factors affecting CE, we identify a configuration of inter-dependent factors that mutually reinforce each other and sustain inertia in corporate entrepreneurship. We also make two novel contributions to theory by (1) elaborating the links between organisational process-orientation, strategic HRM and CE; and (2) refining to our current understanding of human competencies for CE.

Keywords:

• Corporate entrepreneurship
• exploitation
• exploration
• managerial entrepreneurship
• multinational enterprise
• process-orientation
• strategic human resource management

Notes

1. Siemens was restructured in December 2012.

2. The monolingual approach may have limited the possibilities of non-native speakers for delineating details and providing authentic and ‘rich’ responses exhibiting ‘subtle nuances’, thus potentially just ‘repeating company policy and falling back on jargon’ (Welch & Piekkari, 2006, p. 428). However, all interviewees were fluent English speakers (as given by English as the corporate’ language). For the interview questions, an ‘international’ English devoid of dialect, idioms and colloquialisms was used ´to reduce the impact of interviews that are ‘linguistically dysfunctional’’ (Welch & Piekkari, 2006, p. 429). Furthermore, distortion and inaccuracies of answers caused by language translations could be avoided.