Entrepreneurial Freedom to Work and Quality Listening of Founders: Role of Learning Goal Orientation in Start-up Firms

Abstract

Despite the precariousness of working in start-ups, start-ups are still increasingly becoming viable alternative job options (Block et al., 2018). For example, in research by Roach & Sauermann (2015) on the academically trained science and engineering PhD, they discovered that nearly one-third of the study respondents considered entrepreneurship an attractive career option and at least as attractive as more traditional forms of employment in traditional firms. Further, a vast body of literature has emphasised the important role of startups in developing employment in the economy (Colombelli, 2016). However, the scholarly work has limited research on employees' perception of considering start-ups as a preference for work (Sauermann & Roach, 2018). Batra (2017) highlighted in the study that one critical factor that encourages employees to associate with a start-up is the intention to learn. Such orientation that enables an individual to develop their competence and abilities by acquiring new skills and knowledge is called learning goal orientation (Dweck, 1986). Existing studies have confirmed that when employees are exposed to new roles and opportunities to learn new skillset, they begin to enjoy their work and start finding their work meaningful. However, there is no study that has identified the role of learning goal orientation and its implications in start-ups context. From the implication of learning goal orientation point of view, one of the constructs that is stimulating interest is work engagement as preliminary evidence has found a positive relationship between work engagement and numerous relevant employee outcomes, such as employee performance and well-being (Caesens et al., 2014; Salanova et al., 2011). However, very few studies have examined the construct of work engagement and its relationship with learning goal orientation (Malinowska et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2017), across different contexts. Furthermore, in start-ups, due to resource constraints, they have to consider creative reorganizing to survive and develop the business (Sengupta et al., 2021). Zhang et al. (2017) suggested that job autonomy is one such job characteristic, which provides independence and freedom to the employee to experiment and undertake innovative ways to perform the job. The autonomy enables workers to choose adequate strategies to deal with problems in the work context (Frese & Zapf, 1994). Considering start-up employees operate in resource limited environment, they have to unearth novel approaches to manage unique job demands, which can be aided through innovation facilitative job behaviour of autonomy in work. Hence, our study extends the understanding of the relationship of the job autonomy with work engagement via learning goal orientation in the start-up context, which is absent in the research.