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earch to develop the inventory of leader behaviours. The in-depth interview is a qualitative research technique that is particularly useful for exploration purposes, such as developing propositions on a particular subject (Churchill, 1999). It is a suitable research technique for relatively unexplored subjects (Eisenhardt, 1989). The use of literature is important to complement the results of an exploratory study (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). In this way, we used information from the field for our theorizing on leadership, and idea generation and application behaviour. As we focus on employees in knowledge-intensive services, we first explain how we defined this group within the working population and how we traced participants for the interviews. We then describe how we collected data and used the interview results and literature to arrive at our inventory.
3.1 Respondents
Weselected 12 participants through purposive sampling.Each participant was amanager and/or entrepreneur (business owner) in a small knowledge-intensive service firm (,100 employees). Knowledge-intensive service is a relevant but under-researched context in individual innovation research. Alvesson (2000, p. 1101) defines knowledge-intensive firms as: “companieswheremostwork can be said to be of an intellectual nature andwhere well-qualified employees form the major part of the workforce”. Hislop (2005, p. 217) defines knowledge workers as: “people whose work is primarily intellectual and non-routine in nature, and which involves the utilizations and creation of knowledge”.
Based on this definition, a large range of occupations may be classified as knowledge-intensive, including lawyers, consultants, IT/software designers, advertising executives, accountants, scientists/engineers, and architects (Hislop, 2005).
All participants led (groups of) employees as part of their daily work. Since, we wanted to understand which leader behaviours account for variation in employees’ idea generation and application behaviour, we aimed to interview both leaders who were good at eliciting employees’ innovative behaviour and leaders who did not explicitly focus on this or achieved only modest results. Methodologists recommend such an approach in this exploratory stage of research to reveal contrasts and develop propositions (Yin, 1994). We contacted the Dutch non-profit consultancy firm Syntens to trace suitable participants. Syntens has 250 consultants and aims to stimulate innovation in small enterprises by providing managers/entrepreneurs with advice and information. We asked three specialised consultants, responsible for a project on stimulating the use of suggestion schemes, to suggest managers/entrepreneurs from their network who had demonstrated excellence in stimulating employees’ innovative behaviour, and those who were not exceptionally good at this. The consultants maintained long-term and in-depth relationships with many managers/entrepreneurs.
To ensure that social desirability (i.e. the rhetoric people may use to present themselves as enhancing innovative behaviour in others) was kept in check and that the consultants had sufficient knowledge to judge the extent to which a person actively stimulated innovative behaviour, we explicitly asked consultants to think only of strong ties in their network, people they had known for at least three years. Their suggestions enabled us to contact five “front-runners” and seven “average leaders” who agreed to partic