Jörg-Michael Gasda

We contribute to a conceptual understanding of how SME managers can efficiently influence their employees' exploration-exploitation activities or, in other words, how they can foster individual-level ambidexterity, which arises in SMEs when exploration and exploitation activities are balanced. We adopt arelational-contract perspective to discuss informal external drivers of employees' ambidexterity. More specifically, we draw on social-learning theory to analyse how managers' ambidextrous behaviours might enable employees' exploration-exploitation activities. We suggest that it is important for SME managers to serve as role models of ambidextrous behaviour in order to foster non-managerial employees' ambidexterity. Furthermore, we draw on rational-choice and social-exchange conceptualisations of employee-manager exchange to analyse the influence of extrinsic motivators on employees' exploration-exploitation activities. Top-down social processes of learning and employee-manager exchange might together constitute relational contracts between managers and employees. We suggest that such contracts can efficiently foster employee-level ambidexterity as they combine relational with transactional elements by enabling social learning via managers' exploration-exploitation role models and aligning employees' interests with those of the organisation via social exchanges. As the social processes behind relational contracts cannot be easily copied, we argue that employees' ambidexterity facilitates the emergence of sustained competitive advantages.

Information channels are transfer media providing relevant information for discovering opportunities to entrepreneurs. In general, information channels have been researched in the context of entrepreneurial social network or strategic planning. However, research has neglected to investigate via which information channels entrepreneurs actually discover opportunities. Therefore, we analyze information channels of 61 opportunities. For this reason, we interview 16 small and medium-sized business owners in a semi structured manner in order to classify information channels used to discover these 61 opportunities. Regarding channel selection, our findings reveal some of the information channels discussed in the social network or strategic planning literature to be of relevance for opportunity recognition, too. Additionally, we find some channels not being discussed in current literature. Furthermore, we show some of the relevant information channels for opportunity discovery in the context of research about new ventures to be of less relevance when it comes to opportunity recognition in established organizations.

The paper discusses a social cognitive framework of how employee´s entrepreneurial behaviour (EB) could be influenced in SMEs. The model suggests, individual-level EB mainly to be influenced by processes of social exchange and social learning. That means organizational level with individual level to be conceptually linked by relationships of exchange and learning between the employee and the organization. The employee´s perception of the quality of these relationships is suggested to directly influence individual level EB: the personnel´s motivation for EB can be fostered via social exchange; the personnel´s abilities for EB might be fostered via social learning. Because of the SMEmanagement´s fundamental influence with regard to establishing high quality relationships with their employees, fostering EB is regarded a top-down process. To test the propositions, an experimental study design is proposed.

Entrepreneurship research aims at getting more insights about the process of how entrepreneurs recognize unexploited opportunities. Our paper argues that the recognition of under-exploited opportunities entails the need of spontaneous innovative behavior and experimentation in the face of new and different business conditions. The creation of cognitive frameworks occurs, as people learn from each other and from various responses to the environment, finding a common, and probably unexpected pattern that works for them. Improvisation can serve as a means to increase variation, available possibilities and diversity of trial and error by acting beyond the mere repetition of pre-existing routines. New solutions can be found through a creative recombination of resources and past routines and organizational knowledge bases can hence be extended. We develop a model of the interaction between organizational improvisation and the recognition of opportunities in a corporate context, including antecedents and potential moderating factors of this central relationship.