Explaining the impact of employees' entrepreneurial orientation, mutual trust and organisational commitment on individual workplace performance: empirical research results

Purpose - This article aims to explain the role of mutual trust and organisational commitment in the relationship between employees' entrepreneurial orientation and individual workplace performance. It gives, in turn, an insight into factors influencing individual workplace performance. And these factors are as follows: employees' entrepreneurial orientation, mutual trust and organisational commitment. Design/methodology/approach - Based on the social exchange theory as well as the theories of organisational citizenship and extra-role behaviour, the answer to the question on how employees' entrepreneurial orientation within a team, together with the trust in its manager and commitment to enterprise's goals affect individual workplace performance, was being sought. The method used for carrying out empirical research was CAWI (Computer Assisted Web Interviews). The effective research sample included 926 employees hired in two enterprises (478 employees in an IT sector enterprise and 448 employees in an electro-energy sector enterprise). The project is funded by the National Science Centre in Poland (funds allocated on the basis of a decision no. DEC- 2014/15/B/HS4/04326). ndings - The research findings describe both the direct role played by employees' entrepreneurial orientation in profiling individual workplace performance, as well as in relation to mutual trust and organisational commitment. search limitations/implications - The research findings do not take the notice of how employees' entrepreneurial orientation, mutual trust and organisational commitment can be manifested at levels of analysis other than that of the individual one (e.g. team level). Therefore, the next direction of further analysis should involve the aggregation of individual results (of team members) to the team level, because the empirical evidence on how entrepreneurial orientation, mutual trust and organisational commitment work, may improve the performance of whole team.