The impact of employee entrepreneurship on sustainable innovation capability: the effect of value cocreation and role stress

Abstract

Purpose Enterprises generally change their organizational structures in an era of uncertainty for flexibility, and accordingly, employee entrepreneurship emerges as employees gain more power and responsibility during this process. This paper aims to explore how employee entrepreneurship impacts enterprises’ sustainable innovation capability. The authors consider the mediating effect of value cocreation and the moderating effect of role stress. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopted a questionnaire survey to test the hypothesis, and 356 questionnaires were collected from an online questionnaire platform. Findings The results show that employee entrepreneurship has a positive impact on sustainable innovation capability, value cocreation plays a partial mediating role in this relationship between employee entrepreneurship and value cocreation and role stress plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between employee entrepreneurship and value cocreation. Research limitations/implications The study makes three main contributions to the literature concerning entrepreneurship and enterprise sustainable innovation capability. First, in relation to the entrepreneurship literature, the authors shift entrepreneurship research from entrepreneurs/leaders to employees in the digital transformation context and specify the connotation of employee entrepreneurship. This shift further enriches and broadens the research boundary of entrepreneurship (Bhide, 2000; Djankov et al., 2006). Second, we add the micro dynamic mechanism of sustainable innovation capability by focusing on the effect of employee entrepreneurship. Employee entrepreneurship positively contributes to enterprise sustainable innovation capability, which is partially mediated by value cocreation, and its impact on value cocreation is moderated by role stress due to the identity change of employees in the digital transformation context. The authors answer calls to clarify the micromechanisms of building enterprise competitive advantage (Terziovski and Sohal, 2020). The research confirms the relationship change between enterprises and consumers in value creation from separation to cooperation (Tu et al., 2020; Costa and Hafto, 2021). Additionally, the authors discuss the dynamic mechanism and factors of value cocreation at the employee level and further verify the positive effect of an active interaction among enterprises, consumers and other value creators (Matarazzo et al., 2021; Heinonen et al., 2013). This approach compensates for the deficiency of previous studies investigating the influence of value cocreation at the level of organization members. Practical implications The theoretical analysis and empirical conclusions of this study have important practical implications. First, employee entrepreneurship positively impacts enterprises’ sustainable innovation capabilities. Therefore, enterprises should stimulate their employees’ entrepreneurship to strengthen organizational resilience and adaptability, which are important for enterprises to survive in the changeable age. For example, enterprises can authorize their frontline employees with more resource allocation power and reduce hierarchical control; thus, their employees can address emergencies in a timely manner and catch fleeting market opportunities. Second, since value cocreation is a partial mechanism by which employee entrepreneurship contributes to an enterprise’s sustainable innovation capability, enterprises should help employees improve their capabilities and knowledge for value cocreation. For instance, enterprises should develop decision-making support toolkits, upscale training courses and efficient coordination tools to help employees achieve the necessary skills and knowledge. Only in this way can they qualify to perform an increasing number of autonomous tasks. Finally, employees’ role stress negatively moderates the relationship between employee entrepreneurship and value cocreation. This finding provides a reference for enterprises in position setting, role rule-making, role responsibility-planning, etc. Specifically, enterprises should build a feedback mechanism to manage employees’ role ambiguity, conflict and overload; thus, they can eliminate the potential negative effects on value cocreation and their sustainable innovation capability in a timely manner. Originality/value This study expands the boundary and connotation of entrepreneurship in an era of uncertainty, specifies the micromechanism of sustainable innovation capability and provides new insights for enterprises constructing their sustainable innovation capability.

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