Culture of Workplace Innovation in Knowledge-Based Organizations (KBO's)

Success in the new digital industrial revolution naturally requires that our industries use the best available technologies. But technologies alone are not the answer. We need to put more focus on human factors. Workplace innovation not only aims at fostering innovation capacities, it also allows business to remain innovative and adapt to changes more quickly and smoothly.

The purpose of this research was to examine the nature, extent, the association and influencing factors of workplace innovation. The primary objective of this exploratory research is three-fold. First, this study attempted to explore the factors, perceived by knowledge professionals to be critical to their

innovativeness, job performance and engagement. Second, to provide knowledge based organizations with an integrated framework of workplace innovation based on both the empirical findings and building on existing research. Third, this research is also an attempt to explain the uniqueness of workplace innovation construct by examining the interrelationships within dimensions identified as well as relationships with predictor variables.

 

Method and sample

Based on the research model, a survey instrument was developed where most of the measurement items were adopted from previous studies. The survey instrument contains 50 statements related to seven variables. The questionnaire contains questions related to the demographic profile of the respondents.

The sample of this study comprises of Indian IT professionals aged 20 and above. A total of 481 responses were collected from IT professionals working in National Capital Region (NCR) of India.

 

Results

The results from several statistical analyses, confirm most of the hypotheses drawn from the literature.

The study demonstrated job performance, work engagement and employee innovativeness as the immediate consequences of workplace innovation.

Organizing smarter, working flexible, use of hi-tech technology and employee strategic orientation are the main drivers of workplace innovation.

Workplace innovation was identified as the key determinant of employee work behaviors,

whereas, work engagement had an intervening role, which mediated the effect of workplace innovation on job performance, and employee innovativeness.

Work engagement fully mediated the effect of working flexible on job performance and employee innovativeness. Work engagement also partially mediated the effect of use of hi-tech application at the workplace on employee innovativeness and job performance.

Finally, the correspondence analyses revealed that high job performance had a positive association with better work organization; high job performance and innovativeness is also positively associated with high flexibility at workplace. Employees having high strategic orientation are associated with high performing employees group.

Reference

Mohsin Khan (2019) ‘’ Culture of Workplace Innovation in Knowledge-Based Organizations (KBOs): With Reference to IT and ITeS Companies in National Capital Region (NCR) of India.’ Thesis Submitted to Pondicherry University, India.

And see a related article by this author: Association among Workplace Innovation, Employee Innovativeness and Job Performance