MANAGERS INFLUENCE EMPLOYEES' INNOVATIVE BEHAVIOR

Managers Influence Employees' Innovative Behavior in an Organization

Table of Contents

Abstract3

Managers Influence Employees' Innovative Behavior in an Organization3

Chapter I: Introduction3

Introduction3

Background3

Aims and Objectives3

The aim of this research is to find the insight of the manager's role to individual behaviour to motivate, to bring the new ideas and solution to the problems which will benefit to the organisation.3

Chapter II: Literature Review3

Innovation in the workplace3

Routes to innovation at work3

Theoretical perspective and hypotheses development3

Chapter III: Methods3

Chapter IV: Results & Discussion3

Results3

Discussion3

Limitations3

Implications for practice3

Chapter V: Conclusion3

References3

Abstract

Researchers suggest that a leader's behavior may be perceived as an organizational endorsement of promotion-focused or prevention-focused concerns and that this perception will influence employee behavior by eliciting a congruent state of regulatory focus. We tested this hypothesis using matched pairs of leaders and employees from a Chinese firm and found that employee innovation is positively associated with the promotion focus of the supervisor's behavior. Consequently, through their actions, promotion-focused leaders may increase the likelihood of entrepreneurial action in their firms by eliciting a promotion-focused state of eagerness from their employees.

Managers Influence Employees' Innovative Behavior in an Organization

Chapter I: Introduction

Entrepreneurial action is essential to the emergence, performance, and survival of firms in competitive markets (McMullen and Shepherd, 2006, 54). Through the creation of new goods and services the entrepreneurial action process acts as the mechanism by which firms reinvent themselves (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995, 36). Therefore, generating a pool of novel and useful ideas is an organizational imperative (Amabile, 1996, 65). For without these ideas, the number and quality of potential entrepreneurial actions is diminished, impairing a firm's ability to adapt to changing market preferences. Consequently, firms have incentives to seek to ensure a continuous flow of potentially valuable ideas by tapping what often remains a latent resource: the innovation of employees.

In this article, we study the influence that leaders have on employee innovation through the socio-cognitive principle of regulatory focus. An increasing number of scholars (e.g., [Baron, 2004, 25], [Brockner et al., 2004, 59], [McMullen and Shepherd, 2002, 39], [McMullen and Shepherd, 2003, 69] and [McMullen et al., 2007, 38]) have suggested that promotion focus may play a significant role in the entrepreneurial action process by encouraging innovation and the generation of ideas (Lam and Chiu, 2002, 98). Research, however, has yet to study whether and how a leader's regulatory focus affects an employee's innovation in a field setting.

This study introduces a socio-cognitive explanation of how leadership influences employee innovation, develops a measure of an employee's perception of regulatory focus of a leader, and examines whether the promotion focus or prevention focus of this leader is associated with employee innovation. Using 70 matched pairs of leaders and employees, we find a significant positive relationship between the promotion focus of a leader's behavior and employee innovation. Consistent with theory and lab experiments that suggest that situations can prime states of regulatory focus within individuals and that people are likely to act more creatively when these states are promotion-focused, our findings suggest that a leader's behavior may be a ...