Being alert: bridging theory and practice in public sector entrepreneurship

• Published date: 03 October 2019
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM-11-2018-0239
• Date: 03 October 2019
• Pages: 706-720
• Author: Aaron Arnold
• Subject Matter: Public policy & environmental management

Being alert: bridging theory and

practice in public

sector entrepreneurship

Aaron Arnold

John F. Kennedy School of Government,

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Abstract

Purpose –Studies on entrepreneurship in public agencies suggest that managing for innovation may

increase organizational performance. These studies, however, do not take into consideration the processes of

opportunity identification. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to, first, situate the concept of opportunity

identification within the broader research on public sector entrepreneurship, and second, to explore the

relationship between managerial empowerment practices and employee alertness to new opportunities.

Design/methodology/approach –This paper uses aggregated data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint

Survey –an annual survey of the US Federal employees –to examine the relationship between managerial

empowerment practices and employee alertness. The analysis employs a fixed-effects regression to model

each panel of the US Federal agencies, from 2011 to 2017.

Findings –The results indicate that managerial empowerment practices have a clear correlation to employee

alertness and are substantively different from empowerment practice’s relationship to “innovation”–an

outcome of entrepreneurship. These findings suggest that scholarship should include opportunity

identification as a moderating variable in future studies on public sector entrepreneurship.

Research limitations/implications –The empirical analysis should be viewed as a novel approach to

alertness in order to demonstrate the need to include opportunity identification processes in studies on managing

for public sector entrepreneurship. Consequently, the results are not generalizable to all public agencies.

Originality/value –This paper highlights processes of entrepreneurial opportunity identification

concerning management practices in the public sector, which scholarship has traditionally ignored.

Keywords Innovation, Public administration, Entrepreneurialism, Intrapreneurship, Empowerment

Paper type Research paper

Introduction

The idea of organizational entrepreneurship offers enticing prospects for enhancing

performance in publicagencies. How better to deal with tighteningbudgets, political scrutiny

and increased public demands than for a government to empower its employees to be more

“entrepreneurial”–to find better ways to accomplish tasks. Translating a market-oriented

concept into the public administration space has yielded rather limited and somewhat mixed

results. Merely defining what the parametersof entrepreneurship look like in public agencies

poses severalproblems. Is entrepreneurshipgrand innovation or novel processimprovement?

Is it inward-looking or outward looking? Who can be a government entrepreneur? Perhaps

even more elemental, should government bureaucracies be entrepreneurial?

One area that both empirical and theoretical scholarship has tended to ignore is the

relationship between managerial practices and employee “alertness”to new opportunities.

Resolving this gap in scholarship is important because understanding entrepreneurship and

its correlates (i.e. innovation) requires an understanding of what makes employees “alert”to

new opportunities in the first place. In other words, how do managerial practices affect the

processes of looking for new opportunities? Conceptually, this is an interesting area for

further exploration for several reasons. First, integrating alertness into theoretical models of

public entrepreneurship suggests a shift in focus from a specific outcome (i.e. an innovation)

to processes that may (or may not) lead to innovation. That is, being alert is independent of a

specific type or quantity of innovation. This way of thinking tends to fit better within

International Journal of Public

Sector Management

Vol. 32 No. 7, 2019

pp. 706-720

© Emerald PublishingLimited

0951-3558

DOI 10.1108/IJPSM-11-2018-0239

Received 21 November 2018

Revised 15 April 2019

21 June 2019

Accepted 16 July 2019

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/0951-3558.htm

706

IJPSM

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