A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Voice Behaviour – Intrapreneurship in Sheep’s Clothing?
Maria de Lurdes Calisto 1 and Soumodip Sarkar 2
1
Management Scientific Area; Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel
Studies; Estoril, Portugal
2
Department of Management, University of Évora, Portugal and Center for
Advanced Studies in Management and Economics, CEFAGE-UE, Portugal
lurdes.calisto@eshte.pt
soumodip@gmail.com
Abstract: During the last decades there has been a growing interest in the organizational behaviour literature in
extra-role behaviour. The most researched form of such behaviour is organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB),
a form of extra-role behaviour that includes being helpful and compliant, with the intention to maintain and
reinforce the status quo. Although this type of extra-role activities is important, many researchers argue that it is
not sufficient and that organizations also need employees who are willing to challenge and bring about innovation
and constructive change. Voice behaviour refers to the constructive challenge intended to bring improvement.
This type of behaviour is about making innovation and change suggestions and pointing-out the necessary
modifications to procedures. This is particularly important when an organization's environment is dynamic. In
many ways this construct originating from the organizational behaviour literature seems very similar to the
construct of intrapreneurship or entrepreneurial behaviour in the entrepreneurship literature. The authors from
this field of research have also noted the importance of employee-initiated change for organizational adaptability
and there has also been a growing academic interest in intrapreneurship in the last decades. This growing
interest is based on the commonly accepted argument that, in an innovation context, effective internal
entrepreneurship facilitates the firm’s exploitation of its current competitive advantages and exploration for
tomorrow’s opportunities. Some of the discussions around entrepreneurial activity in strategic management and
entrepreneurship literatures argue that strategy originates within the organization via individual entrepreneurship
and that the impetus for innovation often occurs at lower levels in an organization. Considering this, many
authors in this field argue that internal entrepreneurship is in many organizations much more a question of culture
and employee behaviour, than it is of established research and development processes. In this paper we
demonstrate the similarity between voice behaviour construct from the organizational behaviour literature and
intrapreneurship construct from the entrepreneurship and strategic management literatures, thus contributing to
the most need multidisciplinary approach to entrepreneurial behaviour.
Keywords: entrepreneurial behaviour; extra-role behaviour; innovative behaviour; intrapreneurship; voice
behaviour
1. Introduction
The most successful companies are those who learn continuously and react rapidly, speeding-up their
capacity to generate new business ideas and innovation. It is usual in the entrepreneurship literature,
authors arguing that one of the ways for firms to achieve that transformative ability is through
entrepreneurial actions from within – intrapreneurship. This entrepreneurial ability is in many
organizations much more a question of culture and employee behaviour, than it is of established
research and development processes (Burgelman 1983). Intrapreneurs are workers that go beyond
their job descriptions, providing valuable help to innovate some aspect of their companies. So,
intrapreneurship may be considered extra-role behaviour. Extra-role behaviours are those not
included in an employee’s job description and that contribute to the well-being of the organization or
its members.
Similarly, the recognition of the need for innovative behaviour from employees as a way for a firm to
respond to sudden changes in the environment is also not new in the organizational behaviour
literature. In fact many researchers argue that initiative and proactiveness are essential behaviours to
competitive advantage and organizational success (e.g. Crant 2000) and there has been a growing
interest during the last decades on organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and related constructs
such as extra-role behaviour (Van Dyne, Cummings and McLean Parks 1995).
Considering that the seminal works on intrapreneurship in the strategic management /
entrepreneurship literature date from the 80’s (e.g. Burgelman 1983; Pinchot 1985), we notice that the
organizational behaviour authors have in fact started earlier to address the issue of innovative
behaviour. In 1978, Katz and Kahn characterize spontaneous innovative behaviours as actions that
are essential to the organization. "The resources of people for innovation, for spontaneous
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