Entrepreneurial Orientation, Control Systems, and New Venture Performance: A Dominant Logic Perspective

Drawing on the dominant logic perspective, this study argues that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) can generate an entrepreneurial dominant logic among new ventures that facilitate making and implementing decisions to experiment with entrepreneurial initiatives. Yet, the decisions are associated with high uncertainty. Since new ventures cannot endure high levels of uncertainty, to harness the potential of EO they should put in place proper control systems to reduce uncertainty associated with EO. This study examines the moderating role of output control, behavior control, and input control in the relationship of EO to new venture performance. It finds that both output control and behavior control have positive moderating effects but input control plays a negative moderating role. The findings enrich our knowledge on the EO–performance linkage. Moreover, this study represents one of the first attempts to adopt the dominate logic perspective to illustrate EO phenomena, laying down a solid threshold over which to introduce the perspective to the EO literature. And, by combining EO and control systems in a moderating model this study responds to appeals for extending control systems into entrepreneurship studies and thereby contributes to research on control systems.