Employees’ Entrepreneurial Attitudes and Opportunity Recognition

Abstract: Background: Organizations’ ability to recognize opportunities can provide competitive advantage for organizations in changing environment. In innovation-driven countries many en-trepreneurial people are working as employees in established companies and pursuing opportunities as corporate entrepreneurs. This is a group which researchers have dis-criminated by focusing only on CEO’s and entrepreneur’s opportunity identification capability. We would like to research the topic of employees’ opportunity recognition (OpR) and to find a link with their attitudes towards entrepreneurship, something that so far was not completely investigated in the literature. Purpose: The aim of the master thesis is to examine the relationship between the employee’s atti-tudes towards entrepreneurship and their implication on their ability to recognize opportu-nities – a step before developing innovation or uniqueness, resulting in creation of compet-itive advantage to the company, presumably leading to company growth. This paper in-tends to fill the gap in the literature regarding one of the dimensions of the factors leading to company growth and analyses a different business stakeholder group – namely employees in medium-sized companies. From business perspective, it might help company leaders understand the need of encouraging entrepreneurial initiatives and encourage them with some practical suggestions. The research question is: does employees’ attitude towards en-trepreneurship affect their opportunity recognition. Method: We have chosen deductive and explanatory approach for our research because we study causal relationship between attitudes towards entrepreneurship and OpR. The primary data was collected by a self-administered electronic questionnaire. The num-ber of received responses is 53, mainly from manufacturing and service industries. Conclusion: Employees’ positive attitude towards entrepreneurship increases their opportunity identification capability.