Entrepreneurship and Business-to-Business Sales Performance–Model Questionnaire

1. Abstract

The Entrepreneurship and Business-to-Business Sales Performance–Model Questionnaire, developed by John Edwards, Morgan P. Miles, Steven D’Alessandro, and Mark Frost (2023), is an advanced psychometric instrument designed to investigate the structural and behavioral pathways connecting organizational entrepreneurial strategy-making to frontline sales outcomes. Built to support empirical investigations into organizational preparedness for corporate entrepreneurship (OPCE), creative selling behaviors, and commercial effectiveness, the measurement model operationalizes the multi-level interface between strategic orientation and micro-level sales performance within industrial markets. The questionnaire incorporates 44 items structured across nine primary dimensions: Strategy-Making Entrepreneurial, Simplistic Strategy-Making, Work Discretion, Time Availability, Management Support, Rewards/Reinforcements, Creative Selling, Sales Innovativeness, and Sales Performance (Individual). Items were adapted from seminal instruments in strategic management and organizational behavior, notably frameworks introduced by Dess, Lumpkin, and Covin (1997), Hornsby, Kuratko, Holt, and Zahra (2013), and Wang and Netemeyer (2004).

Administered electronically using a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“totally disagree”) to 5 (“totally agree”), the instrument was validated among business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals operating in Australia. Psychometric evaluation via structural equation modeling (SEM) demonstrated robust construct validity and discriminant validity. Construct validity was evidenced by Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values consistently surpassing the canonical 0.50 threshold across constructs. Discriminant validity was supported using the Fornell and Larcker (1981) criterion, where the square root of each latent construct’s AVE exceeded its bivariate correlations with all other latent variables. Internal consistency reliability was confirmed, with both Cronbach’s alpha coefficients and Composite Reliability (CR) metrics exceeding 0.70 across all dimensions. The overall measurement model achieved a Goodness of Fit (GOF) index of 0.427, indicating an excellent fit with empirical data in partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The instrument serves as a critical diagnostic and research tool for organizational psychologists, marketing scholars, and sales leaders seeking to align corporate entrepreneurial architecture with individual frontline sales effectiveness.

2. Keywords

Business-To-Business Salespeople, Corporate Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Strategy-Making, Creative Selling, Sales Innovativeness, Work Discretion, Management Support, Rewards and Reinforcements, Time Availability, Sales Performance, Structural Equation Modeling, Psychometrics

3. Authors

The scale was developed and validated by an interdisciplinary team of researchers specializing in marketing, corporate entrepreneurship, and quantitative behavioral modeling:

• John Edwards (Corresponding Author)
  • Affiliation: Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
  • ORCID: 0000-0003-3890-8893
  • Contact: [email protected]
• Morgan P. Miles
  • Affiliation: School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, University of Queensland, Gatton, Queensland, Australia.
  • ORCID: 0000-0002-1389-1856
  • Contact: [email protected]
• Steven D’Alessandro
  • Affiliation: School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Western Australia, Australia.
  • ORCID: 0000-0001-7480-232X
• Mark Frost
  • Affiliation: Department of Management and Marketing, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia.
  • ORCID: 0000-0001-8909-6341
  • Contact: [email protected]

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Entrepreneurship and Business-to-Business Sales Performance–Model Questionnaire is to operationalize and empirically evaluate the mechanisms through which strategic orientations and internal organizational climate architectures translate into individualized behavioral execution and subsequent commercial quota attainment within complex business-to-business (B2B) markets. Modern industrial commerce requires boundary-spanning sales personnel who do not merely transmit technical product specifications, but actively craft novel, value-creating solutions tailored to intricate buyer challenges. Despite extensive theoretical postulations regarding the value of corporate entrepreneurship, empirical inquiries historically suffered from a lack of integrated measurement tools capable of bridging macroscopic strategic configurations with micro-level frontline cognitive and behavioral dynamics.

From a theoretical perspective, this measurement tool resolves a longstanding gap in the literature regarding the transmission chain linking organizational strategy to individual frontline performance. While traditional sales management paradigms prioritized control systems, activity metrics, and standardized transactional behaviors, this scale recognizes sales professionals as intrapreneurs operating at the nexus of the firm and its external competitive environment. The instrument captures how strategic posture—specifically the dichotomy between entrepreneurial strategy-making and simplistic, rigid strategy-making—interacts with organizational infrastructure to empower or constrain sales professionals.

In research contexts, the instrument provides an empirical foundation for scholars investigating the contingency frameworks of sales performance, corporate agility, and intrapreneurship. It allows researchers to explore complex structural pathways, such as testing whether internal climate conditions (such as work discretion and managerial support) act as critical mediators or moderators between top-down strategic directives and bottom-up individual behaviors (such as creative selling and sales innovativeness). By parsing organizational factors into distinct operational subscales, researchers can avoid conflating structural organizational design with behavioral execution.

In applied organizational and management settings, the questionnaire serves as a sophisticated diagnostic instrument. Sales directors, human resource executives, and organizational development consultants can deploy the measure to audit organizational readiness for entrepreneurial selling. Many enterprises invest heavily in training frontline salespeople to be “innovative” or “adaptive” without diagnosing whether the internal climate actively penalizes non-conforming problem solving or withholds the time and autonomy required to craft non-standard solutions. By deploying this instrument, organizations can identify structural bottlenecks—such as inadequate time availability, restrictive risk tolerances, or misaligned reward systems—that stifle frontline commercial innovation and depress sales quota realization.

5. Psychological Construct

The measurement model operationalizes nine distinct psychological and organizational constructs that collectively constitute the entrepreneurial sales ecosystem. These constructs are structured into three conceptual tiers: strategic architecture, organizational climate readiness, and individual behavioral execution and performance.

Strategic Architecture Constructs

• Strategy-Making Entrepreneurial: This construct reflects the cognitive and institutional orientation of top management toward proactive opportunity recognition, boundary-pushing experimentation, and calculated risk-taking. Rooted in the classic conceptualizations of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), it measures the degree to which an enterprise’s top leadership actively encourages forward-looking, innovative competitive methods rather than defensive maintenance of the status quo. In operational terms, high scores indicate that leadership embraces disruptive ideas and expects strategic initiatives to emerge organically from environmental interactions.
• Simplistic Strategy-Making: Serving as a conceptual counterpoint, simplistic strategy-making captures organizational cognitive narrowness, strategic rigidity, and reliance on outdated heuristics. This construct assesses the extent to which organizational direction is dominated by single-minded, inflexible perspectives that ignore environmental nuance, avoid diversification of thinking, and reject complex strategic scenarios. Salesforces operating under simplistic strategy-making often face rigid programmatic guidelines that inhibit adaptive client engagement.

Organizational Preparedness for Corporate Entrepreneurship (OPCE) Constructs

Adapted from the Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument (CEAI; Hornsby et al., 2013), these subscales measure the psychological climate and structural resources provided by the enterprise:

• Management Support: Refers to the frontline perceptions of leadership willingness to facilitate, sponsor, and champion entrepreneurial initiatives. It encompasses psychological safety, managerial receptivity to unconventional sales pitches, and the institutional willingness to absorb operational risks when novel sales solutions fail to convert immediately.
• Work Discretion: Measures perceived employee autonomy, decision-making latitude, and freedom from managerial micro-surveillance. It captures whether the salesperson possesses the psychological and operational empowerment to negotiate client-specific terms, alter solution architectures, and deviate from standard operating procedures without requiring exhaustive managerial approvals.
• Rewards/Reinforcements: Evaluates the institutional mechanisms that recognize, incentivize, and compensate calculated risk-taking, innovative solution generation, and long-term value creation. Crucially, this dimension reflects whether incentive structures reward novel, high-impact selling initiatives or solely reinforce short-term, low-risk transactional quotas.
• Time Availability: Captures the cognitive and temporal slack afforded to sales professionals. High scores denote an organizational design that allows salespeople sufficient cognitive bandwidth to analyze complex client networks, explore creative value propositions, and engage in long-cycle creative thinking, rather than overburdening them with exhaustive administrative, non-selling bureaucratic obligations.

Frontline Behavioral Execution and Outcome Constructs

• Creative Selling: Based on the theoretical contributions of Wang and Netemeyer (2004), creative selling represents the behavioral deployment of novel, original, and meaningful solutions to client problems. It involves generating non-obvious combinations of products, services, pricing schedules, or operational integrations to solve intricate business-to-business challenges that standardized offerings cannot address.
• Sales Innovativeness: Operationalizes the salesperson’s proactive inclination to introduce, adopt, and master new methodologies, technologies, and interpersonal influence tactics. While creative selling focuses on tailoring external client solutions, sales innovativeness captures the individual’s internalized drive to reinvent their personal selling techniques and adopt cutting-edge commercial practices.
• Sales Performance (Individual): Measures objective and subjective goal achievement relative to organizational standards and competitive peers. This construct encompasses multi-faceted performance metrics, including annual quota achievement, total sales revenue volume, account acquisition velocity, and the institutional perception of the salesperson’s overall commercial contribution.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Entrepreneurship and Business-to-Business Sales Performance–Model Questionnaire is anchored in a synthesis of four prominent theoretical frameworks from strategic management, organizational psychology, and behavioral economics: Strategy-Making Process Theory, the Resource-Based View (RBV), the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, and Social Cognitive Theory.

Strategy-Making Process Theory and Corporate Entrepreneurship

Foundational strategic management models (Dess, Lumpkin, & Covin, 1997) postulate that strategy-making is not merely an analytical planning exercise conducted by C-suite executives; it is an organizational configuration that dictates how decisions are made, how risk is managed, and how innovation is catalyzed throughout the enterprise. The scale integrates Dess et al.’s dimensions to capture the dialectic tension between entrepreneurial strategy-making—characterized by participative experimentation, proactiveness, and organizational learning—and simplistic strategy-making, which is characterized by cognitive narrowness, strategic myopia, and operational dogmatism. According to this theoretical perspective, the overarching strategic posture cascades downward, defining the boundaries within which middle management and frontline professionals operate.

Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) and Internal Climate Architecture

To conceptualize how high-level strategy impacts individual salespeople, the model draws extensively on the Job Demands-Resources model and Hornsby, Kuratko, Holt, and Zahra’s (2013) corporate entrepreneurship architecture. Hornsby et al. established that for intrapreneurial behaviors to manifest, organizations must systematically supply psychological and operational resources. In the Edwards et al. (2023) framework, Work Discretion and Management Support represent primary psychological resources that reduce role ambiguity and foster feelings of empowerment, while Time Availability acts as an essential buffer against the job demands of bureaucratic compliance. Rewards/Reinforcements operationalize external expectancy motivators that align the salesperson’s risk-benefit calculus with intrapreneurial behaviors.

Frontline Behavioral Execution and Social Cognitive Theory

At the micro-level, the instrument is grounded in Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory and behavioral selling theory (Wang & Netemeyer, 2004). In B2B sales encounters characterized by high complexity and buyer ambiguity, standard transactional selling scripts fail. Under Social Cognitive Theory, an individual’s behavioral execution is reciprocally determined by environmental factors (the organizational climate of support and discretion) and cognitive perceptions (self-efficacy and behavioral innovativeness). When provided with structural resources, salespeople exhibit higher levels of creative selling—generating non-traditional, customer-centric configurations—and sales innovativeness. These behaviors directly optimize value co-creation, enabling the salesperson to outmaneuver competitors, bypass procurement commoditization, and achieve superior individual sales performance.

7. Validity

The measurement model developed by Edwards et al. (2023) was subjected to rigorous empirical evaluation to establish construct, convergent, and discriminant validity in accordance with contemporary psychometric conventions in business and organizational research.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was evaluated by assessing the factor loadings of individual items and calculating the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for each of the nine latent variables. Across all constructs within the final measurement model, the AVE values substantially exceeded the widely recognized threshold of 0.50 (Hair et al., 2019; Fornell & Larcker, 1981). An AVE above 0.50 indicates that the latent construct accounts for more than 50% of the variance observed among its indicator items, confirming convergent validity and demonstrating that the indicators reflect their hypothesized latent constructs without excessive measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established through the rigorous application of the Fornell and Larcker (1981) criterion. For every latent construct, the calculated square root of the AVE exceeded the construct’s highest bivariate correlation with any other construct in the structural model. This statistical condition ensures that each subscale operationalizes a theoretically unique construct rather than mirroring collinear facets of a general organizational evaluation factor. For example, the empirical distinction between Creative Selling (specific problem-solving behavior directed toward external client challenges) and Sales Innovativeness (internalized adoption of novel operational techniques) was empirically corroborated, confirming that the questionnaire captures distinct behavioral and structural realities.

Nomological and Predictive Validity

Nomological and predictive validity were substantiated through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The structural paths hypothesized by Edwards et al. (2023) demonstrated statistically significant relationships aligning with theoretical predictions: entrepreneurial strategy-making positively predicted organizational preparedness dimensions, which in turn predicted creative selling and sales innovativeness, culminating in significant positive paths to individual sales performance. Conversely, simplistic strategy-making exhibited negative or non-significant relationships with corporate entrepreneurship preparedness, validating the theoretical framework.

8. Reliability

The internal consistency reliability of the Entrepreneurship and Business-to-Business Sales Performance–Model Questionnaire was comprehensively evaluated using both classical test theory metrics and modern structural modeling indices across its nine latent constructs.

Internal Consistency Metrics

Two primary indices of reliability were computed: Cronbach’s alpha ($\alpha$) and Composite Reliability (CR). In psychometric modeling, Composite Reliability is widely regarded as a superior metric over Cronbach’s alpha in multi-item structural scales because it does not assume equal tau-equivalence (equal factor loadings across all items) and avoids underestimating true reliability in heterogeneous scales.

As documented by Edwards et al. (2023), all latent constructs exceeded the conventional 0.70 benchmark for both Cronbach’s alpha and Composite Reliability. The attainment of Composite Reliability metrics comfortably above 0.70 demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, proving that random measurement error is tightly controlled across all subscale indicators.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality and psychometric architecture of the model were assessed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) within a variance-based Structural Equation Modeling framework (PLS-SEM). The factor analysis evaluated the outer model parameters to confirm that individual survey items loaded significantly onto their designated latent constructs without cross-loading anomalies.

Item Loadings and Outer Model Assessment

During the measurement model evaluation, the items adapted from Dess et al. (1997), Hornsby et al. (2013), and Wang and Netemeyer (2004) demonstrated robust outer factor loadings. Individual item indicators generally achieved factor loadings exceeding the recommended 0.708 cutoff (Hair et al., 2019), ensuring that shared variance between the latent variable and its indicators exceeded error variance. Items that exhibited borderline loadings were retained only after rigorous diagnostic checks confirmed that their retention preserved content validity without suppressing the construct’s overall Average Variance Extracted (AVE).

Overall Model Fit and Goodness of Fit (GOF)

In partial least squares structural equation modeling, overall model evaluation relies on composite goodness-of-fit metrics that account for both the measurement model quality and the structural model predictive strength. The global Goodness of Fit (GOF) index for the Edwards et al. (2023) model was calculated as:

GOF = √(Average AVE × Average R²)

The resulting global GOF index was established at 0.427. In accordance with benchmark standards defined by Tenenhaus et al. and Hair et al. (2019)—where a GOF of 0.10 represents small, 0.25 represents medium, and 0.36 represents large structural explanatory power—a GOF value of 0.427 demonstrates that the measurement model exhibits substantial explanatory fit relative to empirical data gathered across the sample of B2B sales professionals.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Original multi-dimensional organizational and behavioral survey instrument.
• Format: Electronic questionnaire administered via modern digital survey interfaces.
• Number of Items: 44 items.
• Response Scale: The instrument consists of items rated on a five-point Likert scale, where 1 corresponds to “totally disagree” and 5 corresponds to “totally agree” for each statement. Administration is conducted electronically.
• Target Population: Adult business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals (aged 18 years and older), across diverse commercial, manufacturing, technical, and service industries.
• Primary Dimensions / Subscales (9 Factors):
  1. Strategy-Making Entrepreneurial
  2. Simplistic Strategy-Making
  3. Work Discretion
  4. Time Availability
  5. Management Support
  6. Rewards/Reinforcements
  7. Creative Selling
  8. Sales Innovativeness
  9. Sales Performance (Individual)
• Scoring Procedures: Dimension scores are calculated by averaging the individual item scores corresponding to each subscale, yielding mean scores ranging from 1.0 to 5.0. Alternatively, in complex modeling environments, standardized latent factor scores derived via Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM or CB-SEM) can be utilized for advanced regression and path analyses. Higher mean scores indicate greater levels of the operationalized construct (e.g., higher perceived autonomy, stronger management support, higher creative selling activity).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Test Year: 2023.
• Original Publication: Journal of Business Research (Volume 157, Article 113586).
• Permissions: The measure is protected under scholarly copyright. Researchers and practitioners wishing to implement, reproduce, or adapt the complete instrument must contact the corresponding author, John Edwards (Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University; Email: [email protected]), for explicit permission.
• Fee: Free for non-commercial academic and educational research; authorized permissions must be obtained prior to operational administration.
• Commercial Use: No commercial deployment, proprietary consulting re-packaging, or monetized digital dissemination is permitted without formal written consent and licensing agreements from the copyright owners and authors.

12. References

• Dess, G. G., Lumpkin, G. T., & Covin, J. G. (1997). Entrepreneurial strategy making and firm performance: Tests of contingency and configurational models. Strategic Management Journal, 18(9), 677–695. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0266(199710)18:9<677::AID-SMJ905>3.0.CO;2-Q
• Edwards, J., Miles, M. P., D’Alessandro, S., & Frost, M. (2023). Entrepreneurial strategy-making, corporate entrepreneurship preparedness and entrepreneurial sales actions: Improving B2B sales performance. Journal of Business Research, 157, Article 113586. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.113586
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Hair, J. F., Risher, J. J., Sarstedt, M., & Ringle, C. M. (2019). When to use and how to report the results of PLS-SEM. European Business Review, 31(1), 2–24. https://doi.org/10.1108/EBR-11-2018-0203
• Hornsby, J. S., Kuratko, D. F., Holt, D. T., & Zahra, S. A. (2013). Assessing a firm’s entrepreneurial culture: The corporate entrepreneurship assessment instrument. Journal of Small Business Management, 51(3), 437–467. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsbm.12023
• Wang, G., & Netemeyer, R. G. (2004). The effects of job autonomy, customer demandingness, and trait competitiveness on salesperson learning, self-efficacy, and performance. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 32(4), 375–389. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092070304265674

13. Items of the Scale