How to promote managers’ innovative behavior at work: Effects of innovativeness, self-leadership, risk taking and gender difference

Innovative capability and creativity, particularly in high value-added industries, are viewed as core to the competitiveness of a firm. Firms can increase their innovative capability by taking advantage of individual innovative behavior. Individual innovation is also important for firms to sustain innovation processes by including a broad set of behaviors regarding innovation, such as opportunity exploration, recognition of problem,transformation of ideas into tangible outcomes and strategically planning these outcomes integrated into organizational practice. Herein, it is crucial to find out which individual and/or contextual factors promote individual innovation in the workplace. In response to promoting individual innovation, firm’s orientation toward innovation and individual’s self-leadership may motivate individuals to engage in innovative behavior in the workplace. Therefore, this research seeks to gain a better understanding of how firms’ tendency to be innovative and individuals’ self-leadership influence individual innovation behavior among managers. Prior research regarding the relationship between self-leadership and innovative behavior, have failed to determine which self-leadership strategies stimulate innovative behavior. Thereby, in this research, we fill this literature gap as we focus on the self-leadership strategies-innovative behavior relation. Additionally, promoting individual innovation depends on identifying not only individual and contextual factors, but also their interactions. Hence, in order to achieve a more holistic understanding of individual innovative behavior, we concentrate on the relation of innovativeness to managers’ innovative behavior by examining not only how innovativeness influences managers’ innovative behavior through self-leadership, but also whether the perception of risk-taking within organization and gender of the manager facilitates or impedes the process. To study these relationships, data were collected from a sample of 340 managers in banking sector. The results of the research show innovativeness, self-leadership and strategies of self-leadership are positively related to innovative behavior. Furthermore, the results indicate that self-leadership skills fully mediated the relationship between innovativeness and innovative behavior, as well as risk-taking and gender of managers moderate the mediating effect of self-leadership on the relationship between innovativeness and manager’s innovative behavior. Overall, our findings will contribute to an improved insight into the role of firms’ innovativeness, risk-taking, as well as manager’s gender and self-leadership skills in facilitating innovative behavior at work.