The Impact Of Organisational Slack On Innovative Work Behaviour: How Do Top Managers And Employees Differ?

In this paper, we advance our understanding of the relationship between slack and innovation in two ways. We distinguish between different slack types on the organisational level, and hypothesise and empirically test how they influence innovative work behaviour (IWB) of both employees and top managers on the individual level. Applying a multigroup analysis in PLS-SEM, we test our model with a sample of 403 individuals, 155 top managers and 248 employees, from the German real estate industry. We find support for our central argument that the influence of organisational slack on individuals’ IWB differs according to the type of slack and the organisational role of the individual.