Author(s):
Felgueira, Teresa Maria Monteiro
Date: 2015
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/3952
Origin: uBibliorum
Subject(s): Instituição de Ensino Superior - Orientação para o mercado; Instituição de Ensino Superior - Orientação empreendedora; Instituição de Ensino Superior - Individual orientação empreendedora; Instituição de Ensino Superior - Individual orientação para o mercado; Instituição de Ensino Superior - Recursos humanos; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão
Description
Higher Education has been the focus of significant growth in the last decades. In this context, the educational market has undergone some changes and competition among Institutions of Higher Education worldwide was established. Particularly, in Europe, there have been profound changes in the way education has been provided for by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), according to Bologna process, allowing students to move freely between European Institutions of higher education. Also, the decreasing trends of the students’ population and the increasing budgetary constraints, made the environment of these institutions highly turbulent. The changing context of higher education and its confrontation with market forces are exerting intense pressures (internal and external pressures) on the management of these institutions. The need for dynamic and innovative skills and the importance of resources and individuals in pursuit of new opportunities proves to be extremely vital for HEIs. Something essential in HEIs, is seeking to be entrepreneurial, with human resources with entrepreneurial characteristics. The employees of the organisation contribute to various information about the market that can create competitive advantages. Thus, the understanding of how employees define and see the behaviour of market orientation is the successful key to promote a market orientation. Nowadays, the companies realize that their most important asset is the employee, particularly employees who are responsible for standards of quality, value and customer satisfaction. The entrepreneurial orientation is a concept that has been developed and studied in the entrepreneurship research field, where many studies relate it to market orientation and performance. However, most studies focus on the organisation. In this study we intend to study the relationships at the individual level. Therefore we propose the concept of individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) and a measurement scale, and we use the individual market orientation concept (IMO), measured with I-MARKOR. The major objective of this study is to analyse the relationship between IEO, IMO and the Performance of Teachers and Researchers of HEIs. The dimensions proposed by Xiaowei (2006), were used in this study, in the performance construct, because we find them to be the best to relate to the dimensions of EO and MO. Our study population are Teachers and Researchers from Universities, Polytechnics, Specialized Schools or Colleges, public or private institutions, from Europe, North America (USA) and South America (Brazil). The sample is composed of 1 773 individuals (teachers and researchers from HEIs), 1338 from 37 European countries (212 from Portugal) and 435 from America (206 from Brazil and 229 from USA), and data collection was conducted through a questionnaire sent by e-mail. According to the research objectives and the nature of the test data, were used: descriptive statistics that characterize the data; statistical techniques to test, debug and validate measuring instruments, emphasizing the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), Pearson's correlations and Cronbach's alphas, among other measures; and techniques that will allow testing of research hypotheses, as the structural equation models analysis (SEMA). We conclude that in HEIs, at least in the studied population, the higher the degree of individual entrepreneurial orientation, the greater the degree of individual market orientation of Teachers and Researchers; the IMO has a positive impact on performance; and the higher the degree of individual entrepreneurial orientation, the greater the performance of Teachers and Researchers. We recommend that Teachers and Researchers adopt and invest in entrepreneurial and market orientation practices, that enhance better performances and, consequently, higher quality, value and customer satisfaction. Finally, we can say that the success of an HEI also depends on the performance of its human resources, in particular of its Teachers and Researchers. Of this study we highlight the adaptation of the measurement scales of the constructs IOE and IOM, in particular the I-ENTRE-U, and the study of relations between OE, OM and Performance, but at the individual level, something that had still not been done, because most studies, so far, are concentrated in the organisation.
