Managers’ social relationships and organizational innovativeness: Insights from creative industries

PURPOSE: This study aims to investigate whether and how managers’ social relationships (SR) are associated with organizational innovativeness (OI). It addresses gaps in prior research by adopting a multidimensional perspective on both constructs and focusing on creative industries, where relationships and innovation are particularly intertwined. METHODOLOGY: A mixed-methods research approach with a convergent design was employed, combining parallel quantitative and qualitative investigations. Quantitative data were collected via a survey of 690 managers from creative industries in Poland, with a final cleaned sample of 302 observations. The developed research model was tested using a covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) approach. Qualitative insights were obtained from five focus group interviews (FGIs) involving 30 participants, which were analyzed using a deductive-inductive coding approach to enrich and triangulate the findings. FINDINGS: The quantitative results indicate that SR – comprising five valid building blocks (emotional intensity, community of interest, shared identity, private contacts, and professional community interactions) – are significantly associated with OI, although the strength and direction of these associations vary across building blocks and OI’s dimensions. Simultaneously, qualitative research emphasizes the strong ambivalent nature of SR, which typically stimulate innovation through trust and knowledge exchange, but may also constrain it under conditions of excessive emotional intensity, overly strong shared identity leading to closure, private contacts that become nepotistic or conflict-ridden, and professional community meetings that damage future cooperation. IMPLICATIONS: The study contributes to theory by integrating fragmented insights into the relationship between SR and OI and by proposing empirically derived, context-specific measurement models for both constructs. For practice, it suggests that managers may benefit from a better understanding of how social relationships are associated with organizational innovativeness and how they can be leveraged, while being mindful of potential downsides, such as relational lock-in. ORIGINALITY & VALUE: This research offers a novel, multidimensional examination of the SR–OI relationship within creative industries, introduces a two-dimensional model of OI, and illustrates the application of a rigorous multi-stage data cleaning approach rarely applied in management research.