Fostering individual entrepreneurial orientation among employees: the role of leaders communicating entrepreneurial visions and goals

Drawing on insights from construal level theory, this study examines the cognitive process linking leader communication to individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) among employees. Testing our theory on data obtained from an online vignette experiment with 719 employees, we find that employees’ perceived construal fit mediates the influence of construal (mis)fit between their social distance of leaders and the abstractness of the communicated message on employee IEO. In an additional analysis, we refine our theory by showing that being a managerial or non-managerial employee influences our results. We contribute to prior research by taking a cognitive perspective on IEO formation and introducing the effect of leader communication of entrepreneurial visions and goals into the emerging literature on IEO. Further, we advance research on construal level theory by explaining why managerial and non-managerial employees react differently to coherent leader communication.