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The joint impact of perceived influence and supervisor supportiveness on employee innovative behaviour.

Article Excerpt
The interactionist perspective on employee innovation assumes that personal factors and contextual factors interact to encourage or inhibit employees to generate, promote, and realize new and useful ideas in the workplace (Ford, 1996; Oldham & Cummings, 1996; Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993). The aim of this study was to contribute to the field in this domain by examining how employees' influence in the workplace and supervisor supportiveness interact to stimulate employees to engage in an innovative course of action, or inhibit them from doing so. Knowledge of this joint impact of influence and supervisor supportiveness was developed by using a sociopolitical approach to employee innovation.

Innovative ideas are not part of, or do not fit into, the institutionalized systems of theories and practices. The function of established systems in organizations is to provide a common understanding of appropriate behaviour, make behaviour predictable, and facilitate coordination of habitual actions with a minimum of effort (Dougherty & Heller, 1994). Employees who come up with new ideas for innovative change challenge and violate established systems of theories and preferences for habitual actions (Ford, 1996). At its core, innovation is a sociopolitical process that can be expected to be resisted by organizational members who are committed to the existing frameworks of thoughts and actions (Dougherty & Heller, 1994; Frost & Egri, 1991; Janssen, 2003; Kanter, 1988). Therefore, to succeed in an innovative course of action, innovative employees need to acquire friends, backers, and sponsors who can provide the support that is necessary to protect and realize their ideas (Dougherty & Heller, 1994; Kanter, 1988).

Given the sociopolitical nature of innovation processes, employees' willingness to actually invest in innovative activities may depend upon the extent to which they perceive they have influence in the workplace. Perceived influence reflects an employee's felt ability to affect sociopolitical processes in order to provide desirable outcomes (cf. Ashforth, 1989; Spreitzer, 1995). Before engaging in an innovative course of action, employees may consider their influence over sociopolitical processes that generally determine strategic, administrative, and operating outcomes at work. When they believe they have influence, employees are more likely to put effort into generating, promoting, and realizing innovative ideas for change than when they feel they are unlikely to make a difference owing to a lack of influence. As such, this sense of having some control over the course and outcomes of sociopolitical processes in the organizational context differentiates between influence and other facets of empowerment distinguished in the literature such as competence and self-determination (Spreitzer, 1995), and organization-based self-esteem (Pierce,...

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