An alter-centric perspective on employee innovation: The importance of alters’ creative self-efficacy and network structure.

Abstract

While most social network studies of employee innovation behavior examine the focal employees' ("egos'") network structure, we employ an alter-centric perspective to study the personal characteristics of employees' network contacts-their "alters"-to better understand employee innovation. Specifically, we examine how the creative self-efficacy (CSE) and innovation behavior of employees' social network contacts affects their ability to generate and implement novel ideas. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of 144 employees in a U.S.-based product development organization. We find that the average CSE of alters in an employee's problem solving network is positively related to that employee's innovation behavior, with this relationship being mediated by these alters' average innovation behavior. The relationship between the alters' average innovation behavior and the employee's own innovation behavior is strengthened when these alters have less dense social networks. Post hoc results suggest that having network contacts with high levels of CSE also leads to an increase in ego's personal CSE 1 year later in cases where the employee's initial level of CSE was relatively low. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

When age does not harm innovative behavior and perceptions of competence: Testing interdepartmental collaboration as a social buffer

“…Individuals' innovative behavior (Powell, Koput, & Smith-Doerr, 1996) can be conceived as a search process (Campbell, 1960;Romer, 1993) that includes at least three stages (Singh & Fleming, 2010): "variation" or generating new ideas; "selection" or evaluating ideas to reject poor outcomes and identify the most promising novelties; and "retention" or implementing and adopting ideas. Because innovative behavior involves not only generating ideas (what is traditionally seen as creativity; see, e.g., Amabile, 1988) but also discussing and selecting viable ideas, championing them within the organization, and getting things done, it is inseparable from social processes (Brown & Duguid, 1991;Grosser, Venkataramani, & Labianca, 2017;Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2015). Cattell's (1943Cattell's ( , 1987 distinction between fluid (Gf ) and crystallized (Gc) forms of intelligence has been widely used to explain age-related gains and losses in cognitive functioning associated with creativity (i.e., the idea generation component of innovative behavior).…”

Fostering workplace creativity: examining the roles of job design and organizational context

“…There is a long history of debate on conceptualizing creativity (Plucker, Beghetto, and Dow 2004), generally defined in terms of products, practices, processes and/or services that are novel and useful to the organization (Amabile 1988;Franken 2001;Koednok and Sungsanit 2018). Early definitions of creativity focused on the process, whereas more contemporary views focused on distinctive types of outcomes and characteristics associated to a creative product (Amabile 1983;Csikszentmihalyi 1988;Grosser, Venkataramani, and Labianca 2017). In this regard, scholars have taken either a cognitive-abilities approach or a characteristics approach to understanding creativity (Amabile 1983;Li, Li, and Chen 2018).…”

Interplay of network structure and neighbour performance in user innovation

“…One important question about user innovation revolves around what features of an agent (person) affect her/his innovation ability, and how. Previous studies (Grosser et al, 2017;Perry-Smith and Mannucci, 2017;Perry-Smith and Shalley, 2003;Phelps et al, 2012;Shah et al, 2018) showed that two features have a significant impact: (1) the social network structure around the focal agent and (2) innovation abilities of other agents who have direct interactions with the focal agent (hereafter, we call the focal agent ego, and these other agents neighbours). Researchers found that an open-network structure, which comprises neighbours in groups without ties between one another (See Fig.…”

“…1), benefited the innovation capability of an ego as the open-network structure provides a diverse information set to the ego (Perry-Smith and Mannucci, 2017;Phelps et al, 2012;Shah et al, 2018). In addition, researchers showed that neighbours with a high innovation performance also benefited the innovation of an ego as they provided valuable experiences and resources (Grosser et al, 2017;Shah et al, 2018). However, all these studies discussed the network structure separately from the innovation capability of the neighbours.…”

“…On the other hand, the intensity of the network structure's influence will vary depending on the neighbours' performance. First, the innovation performance of neighbours indicates the quantity of the (redundant or nonredundant) information resource neighbours can provide (Grosser et al, 2017;Shah et al, 2018;Lin, 2002). High-performance neighbours significantly affect the ego because she/he receives most of the information resources from them.…”