Tentative title of the research project: Enhancing the individual innovative behaviour in organizations: A social network perspective

Abstract:

Individual innovation at work is an essential component of organizational innovativeness as it is the people who create, modify, and implement innovative ideas. Consequently, understanding what enables or impede the people to engage in innovative behaviour is of a critical importance. Among the antecedents of innovative behaviour that have been studied so far, the main focus is on personal and contextual factors that may affect the process of generating novel and useful ideas. However, the subsequent stages of the innovation process, i.e. idea promotion and idea implementation, have been greatly overlooked. Indeed, making the important organizational members enthusiastic about an idea (i.e. idea promotion) as well as putting an idea into practice (i.e. idea implementation) are both necessary stages in order an innovation to arise. The objective of this research project is to contribute towards covering this theoretical gap by making a theoretical and empirical distinction between idea generation, idea promotion and idea implementation as three basic stages of the overall process of innovative behaviour. Assuming that every employee is faced with the challenge of being at the same time creative (i.e. to generate novel and useful ideas) and routine (i.e. being able to implement the novel and useful ideas), a comprehensive network analysis is performed in order to study how the interaction between network size, strength of ties and network closeness centrality may differently affect the three stages of innovation process in an organizational context. Drawing on the interactionist perspective, which states that there is an interaction between personal and contextual factors, there are highlighted the joint effects of social network features and motivational/cognitive factors on the three stages of innovation separately. This study is expected to have several important managerial implications. First, the identification of the social network features that affect the three stages of innovation may contribute towards better managerial practices in terms of team building at work. Second, by using motivation as a moderating variable, this study is expected to provide important lessons for managerial policies in terms of compensation and rewards as well as in terms of job autonomy and task complexity. And as third, by understanding the moderating role of cognitive factors in the relationship between social networks and innovative behaviour, this study is expected to support the attempts of managers to develop appropriate training programs aimed to enhance the innovative and/or adoptive abilities of their employees.

Research interests: 1. Organizational Behaviour and particularly innovative behaviour of individuals in an organizational context studied through social network lenses. 2. Agent-based models for studying organizational behaviour 3. The differences between the intended and perceived HRM policies/practices

Graduated from: University of Bologna Degree MSc in Business Administration (International Management – CLAMDA-IM)

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