Uwaga i orientacja przedsiębiorcza w gospodarce opartej na wiedzy

Abstract

The paper is a presentation of empirical study conducted on the border of areas of entrepreneurship, organizational behavior and organizational cognition. It applies the theory of attention and attention-based view of the firm (Ocasio 1997) to the research in organizational entrepreneurship. The leading idea of the study is an in-depth empirical investigation of entrepreneurial attention that is here defined as “noticing, encoding, interpreting and focusing time, energy and effort by organization members on reconciling opportunities and actions in general, and entrepreneurial objects and ideas in particular” . Organization entrepreneurs directly affect the organization’s attention through the specific powers, competencies, mindsets, and commitments. The opportunities and actions entrepreneurial individuals or teams attend to enact and shape what they do. They selectively construct mental models that result in entrepreneurial activities. The paper presents operationalization of entrepreneurial attention and makes an insight into its dimensionality. Research results show that there are four dimensions of entrepreneurial attention. Furthermore, we make an empirical investigation of relation between dimensions of entrepreneurial attention and entrepreneurial orientation (innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking). Strong and positive correlations prove that entrepreneurial organizations direct attention in different way than others. They tend to pay more controlled than automatic attention to items of entrepreneurship.