Responsible innovation in organisations – unpacking the effects of leader trustworthiness and organizational culture on employee creativity

Abstract

Ongoing changes in competitiveness and advancements in technology are challenging the ability of manufacturing firms to bring about responsible innovation in emerging economies.A crucial response to this situation involves supporting employee creativity as a strategy suited to foster responsible innovation. Prior research has established a positive correlation between employee creativity and responsible innovation. However, when attempting to promote employee creativity, firms are often faced with challenges to their organizational culture (OC), especially in the presence of limited employee trust in their leaders. Although, extant research has suggested a positive correlation between leader trustworthiness and employee creativity, little is known of the stability of such relationship under diverse OCs. Also, previous research on the correlation between OC and employee creativity has yielded conflicting findings, thus failing to contribute to the knowledge of how organisations may further engage in responsible innovation. Consequently, we investigated the influence of diverse OCs on employee creativity, and how leader trustworthiness affects the relationship between them. To do so, we undertook a quantitative analysis of a coded cross-sectional survey involving 222 participants from 54 manufacturing organizations in Malaysia. The survey data were evaluated through partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). An importance-performance map analysis shows that clan OC has the strongest positive correlation with employee creativity and exerts the highest level of importance to it. Surprisingly, leader trustworthiness was found to decrease employee creativity and to strengthen the positive relationships of market and hierarchical OC with employee creativity. Our study offers novel insights into how diverse OCs and leader trustworthiness impact employee creativity in an emerging economy context.

A study of human resource digital transformation (HRDT): A phenomenon of innovation capability led by digital and individual factors

“…We review the literature on HR digital transformation resulting from digital disruptions that different authors have popularized by different names at different points in time. The literature has used assorted terminologies, such as digital HRM (Strohmeier, 2020), e-HRM (Prakash, Krishna, & Mores, 2019), sustainable HRM (Agarwal, Mathiyazhagan, Malhotra, & Saikouk, 2021), HR digitalization (Jedynak, Czakon, Kuźniarska, & Mania, 2021), and smart HRM (Ogbeibu, Pereira, & Burgess, 2021) to explain the concept of HRDT, which not only differs in terms of definitions but also lacks conceptual clarity and understanding. In Table 1, we provide the definitions of these terminologies from various studies.…”

Chief Digital Officer and Organizational Creativity Toward Digitalization

“…They assume CDOs to deal with the DT challenges ( [79]) generating new digital solutions, developing new business areas, and evolving existing business models. Furthermore, according to [41], DTs are changing the dynamics of business competitiveness, leading to a rethinking of the levels of responsible innovation driven by the creativity of employees and the organization as a whole. So, in line with the latter literature, this article supports the relevant role of CDOs' capabilities on organizational creativity, especially when organizational creativity promotes responsible innovation processes.…”

“…They showed that transformational or transactional leadership styles influence innovation capability. Ogbeibu et al [41] talked about the need of firm direction and leadership as well as interdepedence between a team in an organization and the necessity to be efficiently supported by the appropriate digital capabilities needed to push changes in the organization. Becker et al [79] asserted that the CDO position has been developed to face the aforementioned challenges that occur during a business model undergoing DT.…”

“…disruptive capabilities [53], and organizational creativity [41]. In this case, applying the lens of microfoundations, the DCs of a CDO have a strategic impact both in the microlevel, i.e., the levels of digitalization of employees, and in the meso level, i.e., with respect to the whole organization.…”

Responsible innovation in emerging markets’ SMEs: The role of alliance learning and absorptive capacity

“…Alliance learning also provides a means for improving responsible innovation in Asian-market SMEs (Ogbeibu et al, 2021). In this regard, De Marchi et al (2018) suggested that environmental or social issues do not represent the core business of many organizations, which thus often lack the knowledge needed to foster responsible innovation.…”