Abstract
Purpose – To provide an inventory of leader behaviours likely to enhance employees’ innovative behaviour, including idea generation and application behaviour.
Design/methodology/approach – Based on a combination of literature research and in-depth interviews, the paper explores leadership behaviours that stimulate employees’ idea generation and application behaviour. The study was carried out in knowledge-intensive service firms (e.g. consultants, researchers, engineers).
Findings – It was found that there were 13 relevant leadership behaviours. Although innovative behaviour is crucial in such firms, it has received very little attention from researchers. Leaders influence employees’ innovative behaviour both through their deliberate actions aiming to stimulate idea generation and application as well as by their more general, daily behaviour.
Research limitations/implications – Future quantitative research could condense our overview of leader practices, explore which practices are most relevant to employees’ idea generation and/or application behaviour, which contingency factors influence the leadership-innovative behaviour connection and provide information as to whether different practices are relevant in other types of firms.Originality/value – Neither the innovation nor the leadership field provides a detailed overview of specific behaviours that leaders might use to stimulate innovation by individual employees. This paper fills that void.
1. Introduction
One way for organizations to become more innovative is to capitalize on their employees’ability to innovate. As Katz (1964, p. 132) puts it: “an organization that depends solely upon its blueprints of prescribed behaviour is a very fragile social system”. Work has become more knowledge-based and less rigidly defined. In this context, employees can help to improve business performance through their ability to generate ideas and use these as building blocks for new and better products, services and work processes. Many practitioners and academics now endorse the view that individual innovation helps to attain organizational success (Van de Ven, 1986; Amabile, 1988; Axtell et al., 2000;Smith, 2002; Unsworth and Parker, 2003). In order to realize a continuous flow of innovations, employees need to be both willing and able to innovate. Individual innovation is central to several well-known management principles, including total quality management (McLoughlin and Harris, 1997; Ehigie and Akpan, 2004),continuous improvement schemes (Boer and Gieskes, 1998), Kaizen (Imai, 1986),The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1460-1060.htm
corporate venturing (Elfring, 2003), and organizational learning (Senge, 1990). Here, we address how leaders may influence individual innovation.
Individual innovation has been operationalised in various ways. For example, the construct has been thought of in terms of a personality characteristic (Hurt et al., 1977) or an output (West, 1987). Others have taken a behavioural perspective (Janssen, 2000). We take the same line as the latter and address the influence of leaders on employees’individual innovative behaviour. Much of the behavioural research on individual innovation has focused on creativity, for example, on how leaders can stimulate idea generation. However, when and how creative ideas are implemented, a crucial part of the innovation process, is under-rese
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