Intrapreneurial intentions versus entrepreneurial intentions: distinct constructs with different antecedents

We focus on the intention to behave entrepreneurially in either a new venture or within an established firm (as an intrapreneur), and thus we do not explicitly consider the individual’s intention to start a non-entrepreneurial new venture or to seek a non-intrapreneurial employment position. Low scores on our intentions measures may indicate that these non-entrepreneurial options would, however, be preferred. Similarly, for both entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship, we focus on the exploitation of the wealth-creating opportunity, regardless of who may have discovered or invented that opportunity.

Note that by ‘ownership’ we do not mean ‘psychological ownership’ of the new venture concept, which both intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs might be expected to feel, although this is expected to be weaker for the intrapreneur who should expect to share such ownership of the concept with senior managers. In both cases, the psychic benefits of ownership of the concept will contribute to the individual’s net psychic benefits associated with self-employed entrepreneurship or employed intrapreneurship. Note also that we do not infer that majority ownership of the firm is synonymous with entrepreneurship—the latter is a behavioral pattern that is driven by the attitudes to income, autonomy, risk, and work effort, and the net perquisites of ownership (Douglas and Shepherd 2000; Fitzsimmons and Douglas 2011), but none of those attitudes are either necessary or sufficient for entrepreneurship (Douglas and Shepherd 2000)—it is the sum of the products of the attitudes and the outcomes that underlie the formation of the intention to be an entrepreneur (or an intrapreneur, or neither). Thus, an individual might intend to be an entrepreneur without expecting much in the way of net psychic benefits from firm ownership.