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ees have sufficient autonomy in deciding how to go about their task, and support and recognize people’s initiatives and innovative efforts. Creating a positive and safe atmosphere that encourages openness and risk taking seems to encourage idea generation and application. Although excessive monitoring is likely to have a negative effect, some degree of monitoring may be necessary to secure the effectiveness and efficiency of the firm’s current operations.Creating a balance between stimulating innovative behaviour and ensuring short-term effectiveness and efficiency forms a challenge.
Our overview also contains behaviours shown by leaders with the explicit purpose of influencing individual innovation. For example, communicating an attractive vision that explicitly incorporates the role and preferred types of innovation may guide idea generation and application behaviour. Possibilities for idea generation and opportunity exploration also seem to be enhanced by directly stimulating and probing employees to generate ideas (intellectual stimulation),supporting open and transparent communication processes, creating avenues for knowledge sharing and diffusion, and assigning challenging tasks to employees. When employees have frequent external contacts (with customers, suppliers, etc.) this also seems to spark ideas. As some employees have better opportunities for idea generation than others (for instance, sales people who often meet external parties), leaders cannot reasonably expect a similar contribution to innovation from each of their employees. As soon as the decision to implement a promising idea has been made, additional risks may be involved. It takes time and money to implement beneficial novelty, but returns are never guaranteed. Also, when suggestions are never implemented people become de-motivated. Resources such as organised feedback are needed to enhance employees’ motivation and ability to reach successful implementation. Occasionally, it may also help to provide financial rewards to encourage the desired behaviour.
5.2 Limitations and future research
The current study has some limitations that offer an agenda for future research. As we confined ourselves to qualitative techniques, a large-scale follow-up survey would be useful to find out which of the identified leader behaviours do indeed have the proposed connection with employees’ idea generation and/or application behaviour.We found a wide range of leadership practices that play a role, but which behaviours are most relevant is not yet clear. It seems unlikely that all practices can be treated as atomistic ingredients that have an additive enhancing effect on idea generation and/or application behaviour. Rather, future quantitative research may condense the list we provide into a more limited number of underlying dimensions. For instance, employees’perceptions of (low) monitoring and (high) delegating may correlate and could form part of a broader empowerment-based construct.
Another limitation is our exclusive focus on leaders in knowledge-intensive services. Perhaps some different leader behaviours might be found in other sectors. Knowledge-intensive services should probably be distinguished from firms with other ways of organising the innovation process, such as supplier-dominated firms (e.g.personal services, hotels and retail stores) (Pavitt, 1984; Evangelista, 2000). Such firms are generally adopters of innovations developed by other firms, so innovat