Corporate Entrepreneurship and Firm Performance of Construction Companies in Port Harcourt

Abstract

Purpose: This study examined the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and firm performance of construction companies in Port Harcourt. Competitive aggressiveness and autonomy were used as proxies for corporate entrepreneurship as independent variables while firm performance was proxied with productivity and delivery performance as dependent variables. Methodology: Four hypotheses guided the study which adopted a cross-sectional research design with purposive sampling technique used to select a sample size of 130 general managers, marketing managers, human resource managers and project managers in 26 construction companies in Port Harcourt registered with the FINELIB Nigeria Business Directory. Structured questionnaire was used to collect primary data and the responses were collated on a five-point Likert scale. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics, and the hypotheses were evaluated using the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient with SPSS version 23.0. Findings: The findings showed that corporate entrepreneurship had a strong and significant relationship with firm performance of construction companies in Port Harcourt.  In particular, competitive aggressiveness and autonomy had strong and positive linear associations with both productivity and delivery performance when tested at 0.05 level of confidence. It concluded therefore that it is important that construction companies in Port Harcourt should adopt corporate entrepreneurship in the areas of competitive aggressiveness and autonomy in order to improve their performance. Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy and Practice: It is recommended that construction companies in Port Harcourt should compete aggressively and improve upon the autonomy in their decision-making if they are to achieve higher levels of firm performance