Understanding the Link Between Organizational Communication and Innovation: An Examination of Public, Nonprofit, and For-Profit Organizations in South Korea

Abstract

Innovation and internal communication are essential for any successful organization. Although communication within organizations has long been studied in the for-profit sector, we still know little about the impact of communication types on innovation in the public and nonprofit sectors. To examine this question, we leverage and construct a longitudinal dataset using 5 years of the Korean Workplace Panel Survey (KWPS) from 2005 to 2013. Employing media richness theory, this study finds that internal communication positively influences innovation in the for-profit sector, which is a finding consistent with prior studies. Similarly, in the nonprofit sector, we find that meeting with the executive director and the number of communication channels utilized in an organization has a positive impact on innovation. However, we do not find that these communications have any impact in the public sector.

Psychological Ownership and Openness to Change: The Mediating Effects of Work Engagement, and Knowledge Creation

“…Performance Improvement Quarterly of this study reveal the effect of psychological ownership in the context of public-sector organizations that are typically categorized as autocratic, bureaucratic, conservative, and hierarchical (Agostino et al, 2013;Suh et al, 2018). Harrison and Baird (2015) described employees in publicsector organizations as having less autonomy and taking much longer to make decisions.…”

“…Considering the differences in the organizational culture between public-and private-sector organizations (Choi & Park, 2014;Suh et al, 2018), the current findings could particularly be beneficial to leaders and HR practitioners in the public-sector organizational context. The results From a strategic publicmanagement/leadership perspective, psychological ownership should have a greater focus in the dynamic and complex structure and system of current and future workplaces in publicsector organizations.…”

“…According to the JD-R model, this relationship should be significant with the assumption that change is a critical outcome in public organizations in Korea. This could be interpreted to mean that change initiatives have not been fully prioritized or that employees' attitudes and behaviors related to a change are not fully realized in Korean public organizations even though change is pushed as the critical outcome from the external environment (Kim & Yoon, 2015;Suh et al, 2018).…”

Work Autonomy and Outcomes: Trend of Innovations in Korean Public-sector Organizations

“…Innovation appears as the initiation of the public sector organizations to bring new changes to the performance and service satisfaction in the organization. It is from the integration of new ideas to proceed with products or services (Crossan & Apaydin 2010;Suh et al 2018). Organizational innovation is a well-known action for changes through creativity and development with the organization.…”

“…Innovation is an enabler to improve performance and more responsive to customers in form of social innovation (Osborne 1993;Frederickson 1996;Sorensen & Torfing 2011;Suh et al 2018), such as developing knowledge sharing for the organizational development. It deals with the process of exchanging information or interaction and communication, expert knowledge as well, as feed-back to create new things to achieve the intended goals (Cummings 2004;Wang & Noe 2010;Kim & Park 2017).…”