Organizational culture
There are several characteristics of organizations that may hinder entrepreneurship inside a company. For instance, if the identification of problems is viewed as a sign of failure, this will be a barrier to entrepreneurial efforts. It might be possible to state that innovations often emerge as solutions to particular problems, which means that proper identification of these problems is crucial if individuals are to attempt to solve them innovatively. On the other hand, if problems are viewed as a failure, this will only encourage employees to feel guilty and probably to attempt to hide them.
Another entrepreneurship-hindering characteristic is attempting to keep employees busy at all times. Having some free time is pivotal if one is to be able to think problems over and come to innovative solutions. On the contrary, overloading people with work causes fatigue and deprives workers of both the time and the desire required for innovative thinking.
Finally, excessively thorough and careful control of everything often means that people will be expected to act in defined ways, and will be held accountable for any step that deviates from the set standard. Apart from the fact that employees will probably be swamped with regulations, in this case, they will be discouraged to utilize any innovative thinking.
As for traits that enhance entrepreneurial behaviors among the personnel, Leonard stresses that one such characteristic is the ability of the management to get out of the way of the staff. It is stated that many innovators often simply desire to be left alone. It is difficult to identify the extent to which people should be managed; however, overmanagement seems likely to produce overcontrolling, which, as was noted, hinders innovation.
Another important entrepreneurship-stimulating characteristic of an organization is the tolerance of failure of employees who experiment. This is clearly of paramount importance, for successful innovations often do not happen on the first attempt, and individuals willing to innovate need to know that they will not be punished when they fail and that failing sometimes will be viewed as a natural part of the working process.
Finally, it is important for an organization that its leaders attempt to increase the self-efficacy of the staff. It might be possible to state that self-efficacy, that is, one’s belief in their own ability to achieve success in a task, is paramount for innovation, for, without it, people will usually not risk approaching problems from new perspectives, instead of trying to solve them more traditionally.
Entrepreneurial cultural
PLCs
Professional learning communities (PLCs) provide a great contribution to entrepreneurial culture because they permit individuals who do particular tasks and solve particular problems to share their experience and collaborate. This means that these people do not need to, metaphorically speaking, re-invent the bicycle which has already been invented by their colleagues. Also, sharing experience and discussing each other’s suggestions may provide additional insights by letting one view a problem from a different perspective that one might have missed previously.
Proximity
According to Leonard, physical proximity is important when it comes to developing and implementing innovative ideas and practices. This is probably because, during face-to-face contact which occurs independently of scheduled meetings, individuals can freely share ideas while engaging in informal communication. It might be possible to assume that during planned meetings, people will tend to share only ideas that were on the schedule, whereas during informal communication, they will speak about whatever aspects of their work are troubling them, which may permit for gaining additional insights of their work. Of course, innovation may also be stimulated via other mechanisms during face-to-face contact. Therefore, it is not surprising that additional chances to interact allow for better sharing of experience and result in greater innovativeness of the personnel.