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Personality As A Determinant Of Innovative Behaviour In The Workplace
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CHAPTER ONE
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The research work done on the
characteristics and behaviours associated with innovative people in
organisations is immense, both in magnitude and diversity. This has
resulted into a lack of cohesive theoretical understanding of how
individual creativity and innovative behaviours operate in
organisations. Hence, the study of what motivates or enables individual
innovative behaviour is crucial.
In recent years, a severe global
financial crisis has led to economic downturn in most countries across
the world. Consequently, it has become a great challenge for many
organisations to remain profitable and to survive in their markets.
Particularly, during times of operating in the shadow of a paralyzed
international financial system, the crucial importance of organisations
and their employees to stay innovative cannot be overemphasized.
Innovation
by itself, cannot be described as a single process, rather, it can be
described as a multifaceted process. From this perspective, individual
innovation begins with problem recognition and the generation of ideas
or solutions, either novel or adopted. Another key stage in this
process, involves the innovative individual seeking sponsorship for
ideas and attempting to build a coalition of supporters for it. The
final stage of the innovative process involves completing the idea by
producing a prototype or model of the innovation, which can now be felt,
experienced, diffused, mass-produced, and turned into productive use or
institutionalized.
1.2 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
In an article, The
Economist, Frymire 2006 argues that “the biggest challenge today is not
finding or hiring cheap workers, but rather hiring individuals with the
brainpower (both natural and trained) and especially the ability to
think creatively.†The ability to continuously innovate and improve
products, services and work processes is nowadays crucial for
organisations (De Jong & Den Hartog, 2007). In the current economic
climate, there is evidence to back the increasing importance of
innovation. According to reports on the official Nesta webpage
(http://www.nesta.org.uk/economic-downturn), “During economic downturns
innovation is the single most important condition for transforming the
crisis into an opportunity.†Innovation is critical for organisational
long-term prosperity, particularly in dynamic markets (Balkin et al,
2000). In view of today’s economic climate, increasing global
competition, and rapidly changing organisations, an organisation’s
ability to innovate is regarded as a key factor for success (Shipton et
al, 2006).
Individual employees need to be willing and able to
innovate if a continuous flow of innovation is to be realised (Janssen,
2000). Innovation and creativity has been used as synonyms by many
scholars, while some were able to distinguish the two concepts. Mumford
& Gustafson, (1988) said Creativity has to do with the production of
novel and useful ideas and innovation has to do with the production or
adoption of useful Ideas and idea implementation (Kanter, 1988; Van de
Ven, 1986). Though creativity is often described as doing something for
the first time anywhere or creating new knowledge, while innovation
covers the adaptation of products or processes from outside an
organisation, in practice idea generation is only one stage of the
multistage process of innovation. Thus Scott & Bruce, (1994) viewed
innovation as a multistage process, with different activities and
different individual behaviours necessary at each stage.
It is very
important to clearly define innovation and to distinguish it from
related concepts such as creativity, entrepreneurship, adaptability,
originality, productivity and novelty. In the past, several research
papers did not give a clear differentiation between the constructs
creativity and innovation, which has led to a misunderstanding as
regards the antecedents and outcome of creativity and innovative
behaviour in the organisation. In a bid to clear the air of doubt,
Patterson (2004) argues that creativity and innovation are overlapping
constructs, but the main distinction is with regard to novelty.
Creativity is exclusively concerned with generating new and entirely
original ideas. Innovation is a broader concept as it also encompasses
the application of new ideas to produce something new and useful,
usually in the context of groups, organisations, societies.
Innovation
is often referred to as a process, because implementing new ideas
necessarily involves influencing others, whereas, creativity could be
achieved in isolation. Employee innovation goes beyond individual
creativity as it also concerns the extent to which employees implement
and sustain innovations.
In the Organisational psychology literature,
West and Farr (1990) emphasised the positive nature of innovation “…the
intentional introduction and application within a role, group or
organisation of ideas, processes, products, or procedures, new to the
relevant unit of adoption, designed to significantly benefit the
individual, group, the organisation or wider society.†In 2003, the UK
department of Trade and Industry adopted a more concise definition of
innovation as “the successful exploitation of new ideas.â€
Innovation
theory has repeatedly stressed that innovation is broader than only
creativity and also includes the implementation of ideas (King &
Anderson, 2002). Thus, innovation does not only include idea generation,
but also behaviours needed to implement ideas and achieve improvements
that will enhance personal and or business performance. Recently,
organisations are paying attention to their human resources to produce
innovative behaviours and consequently innovations (Carmeli et al.,
2006), because innovations are derived from the ideas that come from the
individuals in the workplace. Firms depend on their employees with
creative ideas and efforts (Soussa, 2011). Individual innovation
behaviour in the workplace is considered to be the main pillars of
high-performing organisations (Carmeli et al., 2006). Finding out
motivators and enablers of individual innovation behaviour would be a
great contribution towards understanding individual innovation behaviour
and organisational innovation and success (Wu et al., 2011).
Researchers
have worked on several factors that predict innovative behaviour, for
example Climate (Abbey & Dickson, 1983), this represents signals
individuals receive concerning organisational expectations for behaviour
and potential outcomes of behaviour. A conducive psychological climate
in an organisation that promotes innovative behaviour among employees
(Scott & Bruce, 1994), Leadership was also found to be a predictor
of innovative behaviour (Waldman & Bass, 1991, cited in Scott &
Bruce 1994), the leadership style adopted by the manager goes a long way
to how innovative the subordinates will be. Seer, (1989) in his study
found that work-group can also be a predictor of innovative behaviour;
group cohesion and communication were some of the variables that
signalled work-group as a factor that promotes innovative behaviour.
Problem-solving style of an individual was also found to be a
determinant of innovative behaviour; this is the cognitive ability of
individuals in an organization to solve issues that has to do with
innovation (Kirton, 1976).
Since innovative behaviour is expected of
employees, and a major factor that predicts employer’s delivery and
performance in their personality, therefore it will be important to know
whether certain personalities in an individual can predict innovative
behaviour in the work place.
Personality has been known to play a
crucial role in understanding human behaviour. The Five Factor Model
(FFM) of personality has been an important mechanism to understand the
structure of personality (Patterson et al., 2009). Five personality
dimensions namely, Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to experience,
Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, help to explain most of the
meaningful variance in personality psychology with a clear measurement
framework and are responsible for the resurgence of interest to
personality in the field of work and organisational psychology.
These
five factors have been identified across a number of cultures and
radically different languages, providing further support for the
existence of the five factor model and its universal application (McCrae
& Costa, 1997). Apart from the American/English languages, the
factor structure of the five factor model has been replicated in German,
Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Belgian,
Israeli, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, and Czech (McCrae & Costa,
1997).
Personality traits have been known to be related to workplace
behaviours, attitudes, and performance (Bakker et al.,2002) Personality
has been studied by many researchers to be the predictor of so many work
factors, for instance Hlatywayo, Mhlanga &Zingwe (2013) found that
neuroticism was positively and weakly correlated to job satisfaction,
Hence low neuroticism is positively related to job satisfaction, and
less likely to be distracted easily, which has less behavioural risks.
The
focus of this work is on innovation. Innovation drives and sustains the
success of organizational motives; it helps to continually make an
organization relevant even in a competitive environment. Self-esteem
and self-efficacy were also found to be related to job satisfaction
(Cleare 2013). Other phenomena in work place where personality has been
studied as a predictor includes job performance (Alharbi& Wan
Khairuzzaman 2012) and organisational commitment (Hoffmann, Ineson&
Stewart, 2008).
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 6]
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]This dissertation explores Personality traits as a determinant of Innovative behaviour in the workplace. The relationship between Personality traits and Innovative behaviour in the workplace were examined.A convenience sample of 200 participants was drawn for the study. The data was gathered with the aid of a standardized structured questionnaire, comprising of an innovative scale and a big five personality scale.The results were correlated using Pearson product moment correlation. The results g ... Continue reading---
