Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of intrapreneurship on the performance of companies.Design/methodology/approach: The study develops and tests a theoretical model where the intrapreneurship is supported on the factors innovation, risk/uncertainty, risk/challenges, competitive energy, proactivity and autonomy, and the performance on the factors financial performance, growth and improvement and on the variable productivity. Based on a questionnaire, data from a sample of 217 medium‐sized Portuguese companies were obtained. The study used the confirmatory analysis method based on structural equation modeling (SEM).Findings: The intrapreneurship has a multidimensional structure. This model proves its influence on the growth and improvement and the importance and explanatory power of this latent variable.Research limitations/implications: The techniques used to verify the effect of firm size and the age periods has not been sufficiently explored and the direct effect of latent variables of intrapreneurship on performance was not assessed. This work contributes to the theory highlighting the importance of factors in intrapreneurship and the influence of the context in the model.Practical implications: It was verified that the intrapreneurship has obvious effects on the measures of qualitative performance – growth and improvement. This is helpful for researchers looking for appropriate performance measures and for intrapreneurs aiming to get support for their decisions and evaluate their performance.Originality/value: This study considers the separation of the propensity for risk in two latent variables and includes the autonomy to characterize intrapreneurship and demonstrates the importance of qualitative measures of performance perceived in the perspective of medium and long term.