Untangling the Relationship between Human Resource Management and Corporate Entrepreneurship: The Mediating Effect of Middle Managers’ Knowledge Sharing

Although there is a growing body of literature linking human resource management (HRM) and corporate entrepreneurship (CE), there is still insufficient understanding of the mechanisms underlying this relationship. This paper focuses on middle managers’ knowledge-sharing behavior as an important mediator in the HRM–CE relationship. We test our hypotheses using data collected from 163 Malaysian middle managers. The paper finds that about a third of the relationship between High-Performance Human Resource Practices and CE can be accounted for by middle managers’ knowledge-sharing behavior. The findings provide quantitative empirical support for theoretical claims of the importance of middle managers’ knowledge sharing in fostering CE, and for the importance of HRM in fostering such knowledge sharing. The study contributes to the literature on the HRM–CE relationship by disentangling the underlying mechanisms and by providing empirical support for this relationship in a Malaysian context.