How does it feel and how does it look? The role of employee motivation in organizational learning type

Abstract

Summary Employees' work outcomes vary as a function of their focus on exploring new possibilities versus exploiting current opportunities. But what determines how employees divide their attention between these contrasting work behaviors? Drawing on studies on work motivation and employees' impression management concerns, we examine how intrinsic work motivation and self‐enhancement motivation relate to the exploration–exploitation balance and how environmental dynamism moderates these relationships. Based on the analyses of a sample of 638 employees in 34 organizations in Finland, we find that intrinsic work motivation is positively associated with employees' focus on exploration relative to exploitation. By contrast, self‐enhancement motivation negatively associates with exploration relative to exploitation, but this relationship is nonlinear, such that as self‐enhancement motivation increases, its positive association with exploitation diminishes. The findings also show that the hypothesized nonlinear relationship between self‐enhancement motivation and exploration is particularly pronounced in stable business environments. Our findings contribute to organizational learning research and provide a new theoretical perspective on pursuing exploration and exploitation in organizations.

Analyzing the Significance of Transformational Leadership on Organizational Creativity of Employees: A Case of Insurance Companies in Jordan

“…Furthermore, these participants agreed that the ability to intellectually inspire and intrinsically motivate their employees was a vital factor in the differentiation between good and bad leaders. It was therefore seen that this research was strongly in line with existing research conducted with this regard (Kauppila, 2018).…”

What I do or how I do it - the effect of accountability focus on individual exploration

“…This conceptualization is particularly relevant at lower levels of analysis (e.g., one individual decision maker), because at that level there are less opportunities to expand resources (e.g., invest more time in learning overall) compared to the organizational level (Cao et al, 2009). This is consistent with recent empirical work at the individual level (e.g., Kauppila, 2018;Lee & Meyer-Doyle, 2017;Rogan & Mors, 2014), as well as insights from neuroscience that show that exploration and exploitation draw from different brain regions and cannot be active simultaneously (Laureiro-Martínez et al, 2015). However, it is also possible to conceptualize exploration and exploitation as orthogonal, meaning that both can high or low, independently of each other.…”

“…Following earlier research on exploration and exploitation at the individual level (Lee & Meyer-Doyle, 2017;Rogan & Mors, 2014), in this study we conceptualized exploration and exploitation on a continuum (i.e., as a relative focus on exploitation versus exploration behaviour). We used the five-item measure developed by Kauppila (2018) to assess the degree to which individuals have pursued novel vs. familiar tasks. Participants were presented with contrasting statements and had to indicate their preference for one or the other on a seven-point scale; higher scores indicated higher agreement with the exploration side of the item and lower scores indicate higher agreement with the exploitation side.…”

The role of individual ambidexterity for organizational performance: examining effects of ambidextrous knowledge seeking and offering

“…While they assessed how technological knowledge can be utilized to foster innovations for the firm, our study addresses the issue of general knowledge for individual level ambidexterity and thus expands the reasoning of He and Wong as well as of other studies linking the constructs of exploration and exploitation with the construct knowledge (e.g. Cohendet and Laurent 2007;Kauppila 2018;Vrontis, et al 2017).…”