The effects of organisational factors on employee process innovation: An empirical study of China

Innovation is essential for organisational competitiveness and success (e.g. Edwards, Delbridge & Munday 2005). However, the existing research mainly focuses on the radical innovation of products; few studies have examined the incremental improvement of processes in relation to daily work (Stamm 2003; Axtell et al. 2000; Genaidy et al. 2010). It is therefore imperative to study the process innovation of employees in the workplace. Employee innovation can be viewed as a process comprising different stages (Scott & Bruce 1994). However, existing research tends to combine different stages of the innovation process together, resulting in erroneous conclusions regarding the effects of organisational factors on different stages of innovation (Magadley & Birdi 2012). The current study therefore aims to examine the effects of organisational factors including the quality of the supervisor‚Äö-employee relationship, internal communication, external communication, monetary reward, non-monetary recognition and training on the different stages of employee innovation behaviour that produces incremental refinements and improvements to daily work processes. Using a convenience sample, a questionnaire survey was conducted with 1,299 organisation employees across four industries in China. The data were analysed using multiple regressions to test the hypotheses. The results show that organisational factors have different effects on the stages of employee innovation. Specifically, the quality of the supervisor‚Äö-employee relationship, external communication, non-monetary recognition and training were found to play a significant role in facilitating opportunity exploration, while non-monetary recognition and training encouraged idea generation and experimentation. Moreover, the quality of the supervisor‚Äö-employee relationship, internal communication, external communication, non-monetary recognition and training helped to distribute and promote ideas. The findings suggest that business managers could utilise organisational resources to improve the innovative behaviour of employees in daily work rather than focusing solely on product innovation. Business managers should also use the correct organisational factors to target different stages of employee innovation in order to maximise employee innovative behaviour. One limitation of the research lies in its focus on China, which restricted the generalisability of the findings in different situations. Another limitation resulted from using the quantitative method, through which the mechanisms of how organisational factors affect the different stages of employee process innovation could not be revealed. Future research could use qualitative data to shed light in this regard. This research paves the way for future studies to explore whether the findings also hold for other countries and cultures. Future research is needed to consider the direction of the associations in order to provide evidence of causality.