Leader-member exchange theory and its relationship to teachers’ intrapreneurial behaviour, teachers’ work engagement and entrepreneurial orientation

The current study aimed to explore how the relationship between teachers and their principals (leader-member exchange – LMX) promotes intrapreneurial behaviours (i.e., entrepreneurial and innovative activities within existing organisations). The hypotheses were tested using paper-based surveys and scales distributed to 105 teachers. Findings indicated that the relationship between teachers and school principals (LMX) was significantly positively associated with intrapreneurial activities. A high quality relationship was also connected to entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and mediated by the teachers’ work engagement. In addition, EO mediated between LMX, work engagement and intrapreneurial activities. In addition, four different machine learning algorithms were used to evaluate the hypotheses by classifying the study data. Naïve Bayes was found to outperform logistic regression and the other classification methods. This study is one of the few to explore intrapreneurial behaviour in educational institutions and thus contributes to theory and practice in understanding how innovation behaviours take place in schools, and its implications for the education arena.