Promoting Individual Innovative Behavior through Psychological Empowerment

Innovation is the key for organizations to remain relevant in the ever-changing marketplace. While some organizations focus their innovative capacity in a single department, most personnel of an organization is involved with the daily business. Their knowledge and experience could prove to be a valuable source of potential innovation. To make use of this information, all personnel members need to become involved in the innovative process. This research focusses at how personnel can become motivated to involve themselves in the innovative process of an organization. It uses the construct of psychological empowerment, an important antecedent to innovative behavior. While the positive relation between psychological empowerment and innovative behavior has been confirmed by previous work, this research proposes that the underlying elements of psychological empowerment – being meaning, impact, competence, and self-determination – have a specific relation to the different types of innovative behavior – being idea generation, building of support and realization of an idea –. In a field study with 367 employees of two Dutch firms I show the specific role the elements of psychological empowerment play in relation to innovative behavior. Furthermore, the findings show self-determination to have an important moderating effect on the relationship between elements of psychological empowerment and types of innovative behavior rather than a direct relationship. Without self-determination as a basis, the effect of psychological empowerment on innovative behavior is negligible.