Imprinting and founder agency on employee learning of entrepreneurial behaviors

Purpose Many entrepreneurs begin their careers as employees. This study aims to investigate the mechanisms through which employees acquire entrepreneurial capital through their employment experience. Specifically, the authors focus on opportunity prospection behaviors (OPB) – the cognitive and behavioral dispositions associated with discovering and acting upon entrepreneurial opportunities. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a retrospective pretest-posttest survey of 326 Latin-American executives, measuring changes in OPB over a six-month period. Using structural equation modeling, the authors examined how organizational senescence (proxied by firm age) and proximity to the firm’s founder (as a mechanism of behavioral imprinting) influence the development of OPB. Findings The findings reveal two key dynamics. First, organizational senescence is negatively associated with learning OPB, consistent with the view that bureaucratic structures constrain the acquisition of entrepreneurial behaviors. Second, employees’ proximity to the founder significantly enhances OPB acquisition, suggesting that founder imprinting fosters entrepreneurial learning. Importantly, the authors find that social interactions with founders mediate the inverse relationship between the firm age and OPB learning, underscoring the role of entrepreneurial agency in counteracting the inertial forces of organizational senescence. Originality/value This study contributes to entrepreneurship and imprinting theory by showing that structural constraints and individual agency shape entrepreneurial learning within organizations. While older firms tend to discourage the acquisition of entrepreneurial capital, the founder’s ongoing engagement with employees can counterbalance these effects through social learning and behavioral imprinting mechanisms. The findings offer theoretical and practical insights for sustaining entrepreneurial behaviors in aging organizations.