Organizational climate for innovation and creativity – a study in Swedish retail organizations

Abstract

Innovation in retailing is under-investigated in academia and yet a highly relevant concern given the current changes in the retail landscape. Although retailing is often characterized by a dynamic and highly competitive environment, retail organizations are not often considered as 'innovative,' at least when compared with manufacturing industries, or when using existing innovation frameworks in academic literature. There are many aspects of innovation discussed in literature and a need to consider different ways of looking into retail's innovativeness. Among them, the importance of organizational climate on influencing creativity and innovation may help explain how to enable innovation in service organizations, such as retailers. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the climate for innovation and creativity and examine how retail organizations perceive it. We applied a mixed-methods approach using an established organizational climate survey and semi-structured, one-on-one interviews regarding the innovation climate and other aspects of innovation management in the companies. The study shows that despite retail organizations still struggling to incorporate innovation on a strategic level and move beyond incremental developments in their operations, retailers score positively on being innovative regarding certain dimensions of the organizational climate survey. This indicates that retailers (especially conventional ones) could benefit from challenging current practices and moving towards becoming more active and strategic innovators since their organizational climate to a certain extent allows for it. Respondents within the organizations also express a need for better innovation support, whether it is through established structures and processes or an improvement in the current conditions of the organizational climate. How retailers could enable themselves to become more active innovatorsbased on what we know that retailers look more towards entrepreneurship and continuous development as a driving force rather than formalized innovation practices per seis a potential avenue for further research.

The Moderating Effect of Store Format on the Relationships Between ICT, Innovation and Sustainability in Retailing

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The Determinants of Employee’s Performance: A Literature Review

“…Most researches have the almost same framework of explanation these terms. They identified creativity as a stage of process refers to idea generation, and innovation refers to the subsequent stage of implementing ideas toward better procedures, practices, or products (Olsson, Paredes, Johansson, Roese, & Ritzén, 2019). Creativity as the development of new and useful solutions for challenging that is facing an organization, where innovation refers to the implementation or application of new and useful thoughts in the workplace (Khalili, 2018).…”

Relationship between Organizational Climate and Innovation Capability in New Technology-Based Firms

“…Despite multiple references in literature, there is no consensus as to specific attributes of strategic resources, or as to processes required for their efficient development [56,57]. This paper intends to move ahead in a solution to these issues: more specifically, its analysis of the relationship between organizational climate and innovation capability, where the first favors creation and development of exploration and exploitation processes, and the combination thereof as a result of organizational ambidexterity.…”