Corporate Entrepreneurship Environment and Younger Workforce Engagement: An Empirical Examination

Abstract

As organizations strive to engage and retain the younger generations, the increasing growth of the younger workforce as a percentage of the organizational workforce has inadvertently created difficulty in integrating them with the older workforce. With younger employees embracing significantly different values and expectations than the older workforce, organizations are increasingly working to promote corporate entrepreneurship as a potential means of engaging them. Nonetheless, we lack clarity on how the corporate entrepreneurship environment enables organizations to engage the younger workforce is unexplored. Therefore, this study uses the mixed method approach to explore the relationship between the corporate entrepreneurship environment and younger workforce engagement. Adopting a qualitative research design, we conducted semi-structured interviews with six chief people officers and four middle-level human resource managers from six different organizations in India. The findings revealed key themes, including (a) top management support, (b) work discretion, (c) rewards and younger workforce engagement, (d) time availability, and (e) organizational boundaries. We followed up with the survey research conducted on 120 younger employees to examine the hypothesized relationship. The findings indicate a direct relationship between corporate entrepreneurship environment dimensions and young workforce engagement. The study adds to the literature on younger employee engagement by explaining the critical role of corporate entrepreneurship environment dimensions as a driver of younger workforce engagement. An improved understanding of the expectations of the younger workforce will assist organizations in designing work and creating organizational environments that are more likely to engage the younger workforce.