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Abstract
Organizations that wish to establish competitive advantages to succeed are compelled to constantly innovate. Fundamentally, innovation at work materializes through individual employee creativity developed within the context of a social environment comprised of work teams and the overall organizational framework, including its hierarchy. Organizations promote creative idea generation and its implementation by facilitating learning opportunities, nurturing risk taking, and establishing objectives and goals that foment team member engagement. Relatedly, regulatory focus theory states that individuals self-regulate behavior to achieve goals and are predisposed towards conduct that seeks fulfillment of aspirations (gains) or fulfillment of obligations (loss avoidance). Promotion focused individuals are motivated to experiment and explore new possibilities, behaviors conducive to creative thought and innovation, as opposed to prevention focused individuals who are motivated to follow rules and work within established parameters, behaviors expected to preserve the status quo.
This research presents a model and hypotheses that incorporate organizational, team, and individual antecedent factors of individual innovativeness (propensity to be innovative), including regulatory focus. Moderating influences of organizational hierarchy, specifically supervisor-subordinate power difference and employee status differences are explored, as well as moderating effects of demographic characteristics.
Using an online provider, a sample of 147 self-report survey responses was collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, employed in U. S. service, for-profit companies. Statistical analyses were performed, and findings were reported. Hypotheses related to antecedent factors (direct effects) of the dependent variable were supported, along with statistically significant interactions between demographic moderators and three predictor variables. In line with the stated hypothesis, overall regulatory focus was found to be a significant predictor of the dependent variable but in contradiction to the hypothesized effect, the prevention focus sub construct was also positively related to the dependent variable. Remarkably, neither power nor status differences were found to moderate any of the predictor variables. Plausible explanations are offered for these findings, grounded on results from previous research, and ideas for related future investigations are outlined.