In digital competitive environments, organizations’ ability to innovate is more than ever the key to competitive advantage. One way to cope with this increased pressure for innovation is to capitalize on employees’ ability to generate new ideas and use these as building blocks for new and better products, services, and work processes. Individual innovation thus emerges as a key competence required from workers, in turn crucially affecting the way managers make employees contribute to organizational goals and assess their performance. This study draws on the process-based approach to HRM ( Bowen and Ostroff, 2004 ) suggesting that HRM practices may have a signaling effect, to address the following research question: which specific characteristics of performance appraisal are more likely to be perceived as promoting individual innovation at work? To address this issue, we carried out a survey on 865 employees working in large, multinational firms operating in digitalized sectors or industries with the potential to become digitalized. We collected data on the main characteristics of the performance appraisal systems adopted by the firm where respondents work, as perceived by employees themselves. We gathered also data on the respondents’ overall perception that performance appraisal boosts innovative work behavior (IWB). Then, we employed logit analysis to test the relationship between data on performance appraisal systems and data on the effectiveness of performance appraisal as a booster of IWB. Our results reveal that, as compared to informal feedback, formal performance appraisal is more likely to reduce the perception that performance appraisal promotes individual innovation and creativity at work. In addition, we found that in the employees’ perception performance appraisal focused on the achievement of pre-set, quantitative outcomes is more likely to affect positively IWB than appraisal focused on pre-defined skills that employees exhibited performing their work. However, performance assessment focused on the new competences developed by the employees has a perceived positive impact even stronger than result-oriented appraisal. Taken together, these results contribute to advance our understanding of how organizations should evaluate employees in the digitalization era.
This paper investigates the importance of different modes of spatial flexibility as well as of the distinction between autonomy and discretion to find plausible explanations of the so-called autonomy paradox, which maintains that the more the job autonomy that remote e-workers have the greater the effort they put into their work with adverse effects on work-related stress. Using multiple regressions, we test the hypotheses regarding the direct influence of autonomy, discretion and work intensification as well as their interaction effects on occupational stress in two subsamples of 1.380 home-based e-workers and 2.574 mobile ones drawn from the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey. The main findings are as follows. Home-based e-workers perceive that autonomy (namely over work goals) directly decreases occupational stress and buffers work intensification (i.e. autonomy over work goals and in the organizational choices of their department/company). In the context of remote e-work, discretion is more likely to boost the stressful impact of work intensification when work is mobile. At the same time, we do not find that autonomy increases work intensification, neither among mobile e-workers, nor among home-based e-workers (for whom it buffers the adverse impact of work intensification). In summary, this study does not confirm the existence of an autonomy paradox associated with remote e-work. Contrarily, it suggests that such a paradox is more likely to surface when research relies on conceptual frameworks that ambiguously define autonomy in terms of what should be more properly conceptualized as discretion.
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