Assessing the factors of employees’ intrapreneurial behaviour: an Indian context Sunayana Kumar and Rakhshanda Parveen Centre for Management Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia Central University, New Delhi, India Abstract Purpose – This paper evaluates the factors that help in enabling the intrapreneurial behaviour amongst the employees according to their importance. This study will evaluate the relationship between these factors and intrapreneurship. It will also provide a significant contribution in understanding what it takes to be among India’s best companies. Design/methodology/approach – This study incorporates a quantitative approach where the data has been collected through the “Great Place to Work” Institute’s list of top companies in India to work for. The final sample included 109 employees from 50 companies. Correlation and regression analyses are used for data analysis. Findings – The results indicated that there is a positive and significant effect of the environment and organizational factors on intrapreneurship. Within the individual factors, management support in organizational factors and technological opportunities present in the market (environmental factors) are perceived as the most important factors for intrapreneurial activities. Additionally, “self-renewal activities” are considered as an important intrapreneurial activity for the respondents. Originality/value – The results of this study are significant because the sample is taken of the companies already known for their workplace culture. This helped in cross-validating the results. Keywords Great place to work, Innovation, Intrapreneurial activities, Intrapreneurship, Linear regression analysis, Management support, Organizational learning, Technological opportunities, Workplace culture Paper type Research paper Introduction The current utopian corporate world has created an inescapable need for a continuous stream of feedback (Kumar and Parveen, 2019a, b) and therefore, a necessity to constantly upgrade the requirements of the business according to its environment and customers. The upsurge in business has obligated organizations to proact and innovate to subsist in the competitive environment. This sine qua non can be fulfilled by the employees behaving like an entrepreneur, to innovate, exploit new market opportunities, create new businesses and innovative products (Antoncic and Hisrich, 2001). The role of employees has been changed over the years now, wherein they are getting more discretion and responsibility due to decentralization in decision-making (Foss et al., 2015). They have a proactive role in changing and shaping the business environment by igniting new ideas through seeking opportunities and taking risks. In services industries, these roles are much more relevant where there is face-to-face interaction with the end customers (Kumar and Parveen, 2019a, b). In other words, they are required to adopt an intrapreneurial way of doing things. Intrapreneurship, broadly defined as entrepreneurship within an organization (Menzel et al., 2006), requires lots of contributing factors to prosper. Entrepreneurial employees closely resemble the entrepreneurs as they transform ideas into realities within the organization (Pinchot and Pellman, 1999), and they share many of their key behavioural characteristics with the entrepreneurs (Bosma et al., 2010). However, some significant differences between the two concepts have been delineated in the literature. For instance, the risk and responsibility lie solely on the entrepreneurs whereas in the case of intrapreneurs the Employees’ intrapreneurial behaviour The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/2042-5961.htm Received 2 December 2020 Revised 10 February 2021 Accepted 11 February 2021 World Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development © Emerald Publishing Limited 2042-5961 DOI 10.1108/WJEMSD-12-2020-0160