Marié Deseré Botha, Stephan Van der Merwe

Abstract

Compliance departments are crucial to maintaining a competitive advantage, and are perceived to have high costs, compounded by sanctions and the difficulty of proving the value of compliance training. Research proves that an increase in corporate entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial orientation increases performance, and that entrepreneurial orientation is a component of corporate entrepreneurship. This study examined the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and compliance training success, with entrepreneurial orientation as a mediating variable.
Compliance Officers within the South African banking sector were targeted through purposive sampling. There was a total of 1 232 participants in the study, with 341 surveys returned (27.7%).
Structural equation modelling was used in the empirical study. All ten compliance training success models were positively correlated with corporate entrepreneurship, thus proving that an increase in corporate entrepreneurship increases performance in terms of compliance training success. Entrepreneurial orientation positively mediated the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and the classical Kirkpatrick training success model.
Theoretical contributions include supplementing the theoretical knowledge on corporate entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial orientation, and compliance training success. Practical contributions include the development of a training success framework, proposed for South African banks to enhance an entrepreneurial business environment, and a quality assurance framework with suggestions on how to evaluate compliance training success.