Empowering employees: job standardization and innovative behavior

Abstract

Purpose – This study aims to explore the relationship between job standardization and employee innovative behavior, as well as the mediating and moderating effects of employee psychological empowerment. Little research has been focused on the conflicting concepts of job standardization and employee innovative behavior. Design/methodology/approach – Respondents chosen from frontline services in tourist hotels in Taiwan were used to examine the mediating and moderating roles of psychological empowerment on the established relationships between job standardization and employee innovative behavior. The results were analyzed using hierarchical regression models. Findings – The results show that job standardization had a negative effect on employee innovative behavior. In addition, employee psychological empowerment mediated the effect of job standardization on innovative behavior. Subsequently, employee psychological empowerment played a buffering role and moderated the job standardization–innovative behavior relationship. Practical implications – Hotel management needs to use both training and work process review to help employees innovate while still understanding the meaning of their work, enhancing self-efficacy, self-determination and the impact of decision-making. Originality/value – This study gives both theoretical and empirical evidence to clarify the effect of psychological empowerment on the importance of job standardization and innovative behavior in organizations. This is the only study that has investigated this topic in the hospitality field and therefore makes significant strides in understanding the impact of psychological empowerment on hotel employees’ innovative behavior.

Assessing the Mediation Mechanism of Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment on Innovative Behavior: The Perspective of Psychological Capital

“…An employee with a high job satisfaction has less turnover intentions (Poon, 2003), which is beneficial for the development of the organization (Reiner and Zhao, 1999). Innovative measures should be taken by traditional and high-paying companies to improve their competitiveness and enhance their performance, as innovation has positive effects on company performance (Damanpour et al, 1989;Khan and Manopichetwattana, 1989;Luoh et al, 2014). Therefore, the following hypothesis was derived in this study:…”

Fostering Frontline Employees’ Innovative Service Behavior: The Role of Workplace Friendship and Knowledge Sharing Process

“…All of the survey items were translated from English into Indonesian language using a method of forwarding and backward translation (Brislin, 1970). The measurement of innovative service behavior (six items) was a contextualized version of Luoh, Tsaur, & Tang (2014). Workplace friendship was measured using a workplace prevalence instrument (six items) developed by Nielsen, Jex & Adam (2000).…”

Challenges to the Promotion of Employee-Driven Innovation in State-Owned Enterprises: Two Cases from the Automotive Sector in China

“…The role of employees in the innovation process has been widely acknowledged and studied from various angles. Human resource management (HRM) studies on this topic stress the development of employee competence through trainings, empowering employees, involving them into decision making and innovation process, and consequently improving firms innovation performance [9][10][11]. Knowledge management and organizational learning literatures focus on sharing and using tacit knowledge possessed by ordinary employees through collective learning [34][35][36].…”

“…Existing empirical studies related to EDIs have mainly focused on two aspects, including: (1) characteristics of employees, such as motivation from perceived well-being and interactional justice [5] and self-efficacy of employees [6] and (2) characteristics of organizations, such as leadership behavior [7], and use of team works [8]. However, these studies have been confined to investigate impact factors of EDIs at the functional level within firms, such as how certain human resource management (HRM) [9][10][11] and operations management (OM) [12] practices that could promote the EDIs performance. Little of them acknowledge the fact that the proposed HRM and OM practices are all heavily impacted by decision and preference of top managers of firms, to be more specific, by their perceptions towards the value of EDIs, and their willingness to allocate resources to support EDIs.…”