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ween participation and employees’ innovative behaviour, measured using self-ratings of employees’ suggestions and implementation efforts. Similarly,
Frischer (1993) found that when product-development managers gave authority to their subordinates and provided them with a sense of responsibility, subordinates were aware of a positive innovation climate.
LMX theory focuses on the social exchange relationships between leaders and employees. It proposes that the quality of the relationship between a leader and follower influences outcomes such as subordinate satisfaction, supervisor satisfaction, performance, commitment, role conflict, role clarity and turnover intentions (Yukl, 2002). Some suggest that the quality of the relationship between a leader and follower is also related to innovativeness (Graen and Scandura, 1987). High-quality exchange relationships include providing employees with challenging tasks, support in riskysituations and the provision of task-related resources and recognition, all facilitating individual innovation. In line with this, Tierney et al. (1999) found a positive relationship between high-quality relationships and creativity in a study among R&D leaders and
mployees of a chemical firm. Janssen and van Yperen (2004) also found that high-quality relationships had a positive impact on the broader construct of innovative behaviour. In conclusion, most studies on the connection between leadership and individual innovation have explored the role of theory-based leadership styles, originally developed for other purposes such as the assessment of leaders’ impact on performance or effectiveness rather than innovation-related outcomes. They did not attempt to develop models aimed specifically at finding out how leader behaviour could stimulate the innovative behaviour of employees. Leadership models developed for more routine settings may not generalize to the leadership of innovative people (Mumford and Licuanan, 2004). Also, the studies that were carried out focus on the leader’s role in stimulating creativity (Shalley and Gilson, 2004),whereas the role of leaders in employees’ implementation of innovations received little attention. We, therefore, explored how leaders may trigger both these aspects of employees’ innovative behaviour.
There are various views as to how leadership differs from management and entrepreneurship. Leadership is seen as a subset of managerial activities, others see leading and managing as overlapping roles, yet others describe them as different processes. For example, Kotter (1990) differentiates their intended outcomes: management seeks to produce predictability and order, while leadership aims to produce change. In Kotter’s view, leaders and managers are not necessarily different persons, but rather different roles. This also holds for entrepreneurship. For example, when organizations grow beyond a few employees, entrepreneurs (should) start worrying about how followers must be directed towards specific goals (Shane, 2003). In this study, entrepreneurship, management and leadership are roles that are not mutually exclusive. Most of our interviewees fulfilled all three roles, including being a leader as part of their work. They are also managers and most were the entrepreneurs that started their firm. We thus use “leader” “manager” and “entrepreneur” interchangeably in referring to the interviewees.
3. Methodology
We combined in-depth interviews and literature res