Research On The Effect Of Perceived Entrepreneurial Environment On Middle Managers’ Corporate Entrepreneurial Behavior

More and more corporations begin to adopt the corporate entrepreneurial strategy along with the intense uncertain environment. Middle managers’ corporate entrepreneurial behavior plays a key role in corporate entrepreneurship. In this paper, based-on corporate entrepreneurial theory and social cognition theory, a research model was proposed to investigate the relationships among perceived entrepreneurial environment, middle managers’corporate entrepreneurial behavior and entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and 280 in-service middle managers were taken as samples to justify the hypothesis proposed while following the deducted conceptual model. The results show that there is significant effect among perceived entrepreneurial environment, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and middle managers’ corporate entrepreneurial behavior. We tested the mediation role of entrepreneurial self-efficacy between environment and behavior.The traditional studies mostly research the founders or top management team, ignoring the effect of middle managers on corporate entrepreneurship. Scholars have found that middle managers have an impact on corporate entrepreneurship though carrying out enterprise behavior such as creating new business, developing new products and new services, promoting the company change. In order to comprehensive understanding of strategic option and corporate entrepreneurship, it’s necessary to analysis middle managers’ corporate entrepreneurial behavior. First, we sorted out the relevant theory and literature on corporate entrepreneurial theory, social cognition theory and middle managers’ corporate entrepreneurial behavior, and then defined the concept of perceived entrepreneurial environment, middle managers’ corporate entrepreneurial behavior and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Second, basing on the literature research we selected the entrepreneurial self-efficacy as the mediating variable between environment and behavior and presented a conceptual model. Then we analyzed the relationship of each variable in detail, proposed the corresponding hypotheses, and formed the final empirical model. Finally, based on the valid data, we tested the proposed hypotheses and theoretical models through analyzing the reliability and validity of the questionnaire.By introducing entrepreneurial self-efficacy, this paper enriches the corporate entrepreneurship theory and expands the theoretical framework for the entrepreneurship, perfects the causal logic of middle managers’ corporate entrepreneurial behavior. This opens the "black box" that perceived entrepreneurial environment effect on middle managers’corporate entrepreneurial behavior. It is a new discovery under Chinese cultural context studying the middle managers in the field of corporate entrepreneurial. Our findings provide new perspective and evidence for firm to stimulate middle managers’ corporate entrepreneurial behavior.