Perceptions of Corporate Entrepreneurship in Air Force Organizations: Antecedents and Outcomes

Today's United States Air Force is engaged in a dizzying array of missions from applying air power in austere places like Afghanistan and Iraq, to delivering materials and medicines in response to natural disasters, to maintaining air defenses over the United States, to operating satellites in deep space. Since the early 1990s, these missions have been executed with aging, less capable equipment while the resources available to modernize these systems have been diminishing. To counter this trend, Secretary of the Air Force Mike Wynne and General Mike Moseley, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, made the decision to reduce the service's manning level by 40,000 members before 2010 (Personal communication, August 23, 2006). The Quadrennial Defense Review (2006) codified their decision, suggesting that the drawdown would permit the Air Force to stay within its congressionally allocated budgets and, simultaneously, increase its investment in modern systems. In conjunction with this drawdown, Air Force leaders have called for a transformation of the myriad processes that control, sustain, and support these diverse missions so that the service can still fulfill its role. The research and development, systems acquisition, personnel management, and force deployment and employment processes all require new, innovative methods so that each can be accomplished faster, cheaper, and more efficiently (Wynne and Moseley, 2006). Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld (2002) argued that this transformation should not be limited to the Air Force, stating, "We must transform not only our armed forces but also the Defense Department that serves them-by encouraging a culture of creativity and risk taking. We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach..." (29). Generally, entrepreneurial behaviors in larger organizations have been termed corporate entrepreneurship. And, the diffusion and adoption of corporate entrepreneurship has positively affected organizations' performance (e.g., Sambrook and Roberts, 2005). McGrath and MacMillan (2000), for instance, found that the entrepreneurial behaviors they observed in global companies such as Citibank, General Electric, and Honda led to breakthrough products and services, development of new technologies, and increased performance. Accordingly, several researchers have tried to isolate the organizational factors that promote corporate entrepreneurship. In sum, these efforts have converged on five factors, to include appropriate use of rewards; management support; resource availability; a supportive organizational structure; and risk-taking and failure tolerance. To date, the private sector has been the focal point of research on corporate entrepreneurship. Rather than exploring ways that public sector leaders could encourage entrepreneurship within their organizations, public sector research in the realm of entrepreneurship has explored how public organizations facilitate and encourage entrepreneurship in the private sector. Goetz and Freshwater (2001), for instance, studied the role that state and local governments play in promoting entrepreneurial activity within a community. Similarly, Kassicieh and Radosevich (1996) looked at the ways that work done in public sector laboratories leads to entrepreneurial activities within the private sector, concluding that more should be done to ensure new technologies developed in labs translated into meaningful private sector developments. This study shifts the focus from the way that public sector organizations encourage entrepreneurship in the private sector toward how public sector organizations can themselves become more entrepreneurial. To do this, we capitalize on the efforts of previous researchers that have identified key antecedents of corporate entrepreneurship. And, we test whether these factors might help leaders promote entrepreneurial activity within a public sector organization. We chose to conduct this test within the Air Force because senior leaders have mandated that the Defense Department and the respective military services must become more entrepreneurial. …