Climate for Personal Initiative and Radical and Incremental Innovation in Firms: A Validation Study

Abstract

We examine whether organizational climate for personal initiative (PI climate) is conducive to firm innovation in small and medium-sized firms. Employees with PI are self-starting, proactive, and persistent, and a PI climate is characterized by common norms of encouraging PI at the workplace. A climate that fosters PI among employees would enhance the innovation output of firms, since it increases not only proactive thinking about future opportunities and problems but self-starting action as well. This PI climate is distinct from the team climate inventory (TCI, Anderson and West, 1996). We contrast the PI climate measure (Baer and Frese, 2003) with the TCI for predicting radical and incremental innovations in firms. Findings reveal (with 25 firms, N = 82 employees) that PI climate was related to radical innovation, but not incremental innovation. On the other hand, the TCI (unrelated to radical innovation) was related to incremental innovation. Our study results imply that different organizational climates account for the different forms of innovation in firms.

Resilient employees are creative employees, when the workplace forces them to be

“…The positive relationship between employees' resilience and disruptive creative behaviour also gets invigorated when employees believe that the resource gains that can arise with this behaviour might protect them against the hardships caused by adverse work conditions. We conceptualized these hardships as manifest in the presence of excessive workloads (Russ-Eft, 2001) and adverse decision making in the form of strict rigidity (Fischer et al, 2014) or dysfunctional politics (Abbas et al, 2014)-workplace features that compromise the quality of employees' organizational functioning.…”

“…We also explicate that the anticipated value of leveraging resilience to engage in disruptive creative behaviours is greater when employees face resource-draining circumstances, due the presence of excessive time pressures (Avery, Tonidandel, Volpone, & Raghuram, 2010) or organizational decision making marked by a lack of flexibility (Fischer et al, 2014) or behind-the-scenes decision dynamics (Chang, Rosen, & Levy, 2009). Together, these three contingency factors offer a novel, parsimonious, yet comprehensive perspective on how employees' exposure to unfavourable, resource-draining work circumstances may trigger their motivation to leverage the personal resource of resilience, in the form of disruptive creative behaviours (Hobfoll & Shirom, 2000).…”

The Role of Error Management Culture for Firm and Individual Innovativeness

“…Therefore, we used a questionnaire to measure innovativeness. We based our index on validated questionnaire items adapted from innovativeness studies (Cosh, Hughes, Kelkle, Morre, Wilkinson, & Kitson ; Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, ; Fischer, Frese, Mertins et al, ; Romijn & Albaladejo, ). The overall scale consists of the following items (all slightly adapted): (1)“Product innovation is a good or service, which is either new or significantly improved.…”

Team Efficiency in Organizations: A Group Perspective on Initiative

“…The result of this should be innovation. In line with this logic, Fischer et al [64]. distinguish between two types of innovation: incremental and radical.…”

“…According to the literature, individual and organizational performance are the principal outcomes of personal initiative [13]. More specifically, research has observed a positive relationship between (a) personal initiative and innovation [62][63][64][65] as well as between (b) team initiative and productivity and (c) climate for initiative and innovation [23].…”