Prevalence of entrepreneurial management practices in technology-based firms in Malaysia

Abstract

It has been widely agreed that entrepreneurship leads to firms’ success. Since companies with a high
level of entrepreneurial propensity are focussed on “the pursuit of opportunity regardless of resources
currently controlled”, it can be expected that those companies will be highly leveraged, resulting in
high performance and effectiveness and eventually will lead to business success. Stevenson’s six
dimensional construct of Entrepreneurial Management (EM), as interpreted and operationalised by
Brown et al. (2001), consists of strategic orientation (SO), resource orientation (RO), management
structure (MS), reward philosophy (RP), growth orientation (GO) and entrepreneurial culture (EC). This
study attempts to explore on the issue of as to what extent the entrepreneurial management approach
is being adopted by the sample firms. Based on the global measure of EM, the results of the descriptive
statistical analysis suggest that a large majority of the firms may be classified as entrepreneurial. On
further investigation on each dimension of the EM construct, mixed results were found on the
prevalence of EM. MS, SO and EC dimensions show high prevalence in firms with strong
entrepreneurial propensity. This indicates that the firms tend to be more entrepreneurial with regard to
the MS, SO and EC dimensions. However, for the GO and RO dimensions, the results show that the
sample firms tend to be on the average scores.