Ways Executives Interpret and Act Upon Common Workplace Events: Implications for the Entrepreneurial Executive

Entrepreneurial executives actively seek opportunities for their companies. Their efforts to identify these opportunities and commercially exploit them can be greatly enhanced by executives that actively seek information that leads to opportunity recognition and constructively collaborate with their peers to aid in the exploitation of those opportunities. This study assesses the effect of the Need for Closure (NFC) on the degree credit union executives rely on their own experiences and coworkers of equal hierarchical rank in interpreting common workplace events. The patterns of behavior they exhibited in interpreting and acting on these events should also be reflective of how these individuals would pursue entrepreneurial activities. Respondents were classified into two equal size groups based on their NFC (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994; Kruglanski, Webster & Klem, 1993) scale scores. The high and low NFC group scores on the Event Management Questionnaire (Smith, Peterson & Schwartz, 2002) reflecting their reliance on their own experiences and coworkers of equal hierarchical rank were then compared. The results supported the hypothesis that NFC would be negatively related to the reliance on coworkers but did not support the hypothesis that NFC would be positively related to reliance on the executives' prior experience. Post hoc analysis revealed that the relationship between NFC and reliance on coworkers was only significant in the case of female respondents.

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