Promoting employees’ innovative work behavior through innovation-specific leader behavior
An AMO-approach
Publication date
2024-11-04
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Organisational unit
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Series or journal
Journal of Management & Organization
ISSN
Periodical volume
31
Periodical issue
1
First page
215
Last page
232
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Abstract
Fostering employees’ innovative work behavior (EIB) has become one of the most important tasks of leaders. Although numerous studies have investigated the relationship between leadership and EIB, it is still unclear which specific leader behaviors promote EIB. Previous research has focused on leadership in terms of broad, non-innovation-specific leadership styles. Behavioral sub-factors have been neglected, and prioritization according to the importance of individual behaviors is still lacking. To address these issues, we identify innovation-specific leader behaviors and analyze which behaviors are best suited to increase EIB. To explain the relationship between the respective leader behaviors and EIB, we rely on the Ability–Motivation–Opportunity (AMO) framework and distinguish between ability-enhancing, motivation-enhancing, and opportunity-enhancing leadership behaviors. Our empirical analyzes are based on data from 1214 German employees. Our findings reveal that motivation- and opportunity-enhancing leadership behaviors foster EIB, with certain innovation-specific behaviors being particularly important for EIB. Building on our results, we provide guidelines for innovation-specific leadership.
Description
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).
Version
Published version
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