The necessity of job design for employee creativity and innovation : nothing happens without supervisor support

Hernaus, Tomislav (author), Dragičević, Nikolina (author), Hauff, Sven (author)

Job design is a favourable antecedent of discretionary innovative work behaviours (IWB). Although multiple job characteristics (i.e., job demands and job resources) define the work environment, only a few are supposed to be of dominant and critical importance for employee creativity and innovation. By complementing the common sufficient causality with necessity theorizing, we explored the creativity-enabling and innovation-enabling nature of the Job Demands – Control – Support (JDCS) model components. A multi-method approach (i.e., multiple regression, relative importance analysis, and necessary condition analysis) was applied in a comparative contextualized research design (i.e., a three-study field survey research) involving 358 employees and 86 supervisors from an EU member country. The converging results showed that without experiencing vitally important support from a supervisor, enhancing other job characteristics will not lead to high levels of subordinate’s IWB. The present research also recognized work autonomy as an additional task-related critical success factor, which was only necessary when considering employee innovation as a frequently occurring time-lagged outcome. Contrary to our theory-derived assumptions, job complexity as a representative type of job demand was not necessary for IWB. Practitioners may benefit from the findings because they can better understand the prerequisites and priorities for enabling employees’ IWB via job design.

• Language: English
• Keywords: organization, creativity, innovations, analysis, job design, necessary condition analysis, multi-method approach
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: EF - School of Economics and Business
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2024
• Number of pages: Str. 583-598
• Numbering: Vol. 33, no. 5
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-162186
• UDC: 658.3
• ISSN on article: 1359-432X
• DOI: 10.1080/1359432X.2024.2348772
• COBISS.SI-ID: 197352195
• Publication date in RUL: 19.09.2024

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: European journal of work and organizational psychology
• Shortened title: Eur. j. work organ. psychol.
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• ISSN: 1359-432X
• COBISS.SI-ID: 11626594

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Description: The most restrictive Creative Commons license. This only allows people to download and share the work for no commercial gain and for no other purposes.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: organizacija, ustvarjalnost, inovacije, analiza

Projects

• Funder: HRZZ - Croatian Science Foundation
• Project number: IP-2020-02-8889
• Name: Multilevel organization design configurations: understanding the heterogeneity–homogeneity duality

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: P5-0441
• Name: Regeneracija ekonomije in posla