Mapping Antecedents of Innovative Work Behavior: A Conceptual Review

Employee innovative behavior contributes to organizational success, and to overall business viability in the current competitive business environment. This paper analyzes past research and outlines some antecedents of innovative work behaviour. The paper proposes a framework depicting relationships among transformational leadership, leader-member exchange, employee perceptions of fairness and innovative work behavior. The paper follows a rigorous, systematic review of published studies representing the literature addressing transformational leadership, leader-member exchange, employee perceptions of fairness and innovative work behavior. The paper relied extensively on computerized keyword searches in the main business source databases of EBSCOhost, Emerald, ProQuest, ScienceDirect and SpringerLink supplemented by a manual review. The review leads to a credible conceptual framework that elucidates the relationship among transformational leadership, leader-member exchange, employee perceptions of fairness and innovative work behavior. Consequently, the framework advances theories on effective leader behavior, employees’ perceptions of fairness and innovative work behavior. The framework helps unpack some underlying mechanisms through which leadership directly and indirectly influences employee innovative work behavior. Recognizing that innovative work behavior is influenced by the quality of supervisor-subordinate relationship, our conceptual framework stimulates a behavior-oriented approach to innovative work behavior research and has the potential to generate actionable knowledge to manage innovative work behavior. Top management could utilize our framework when executing organizational design interventions that engender and shape innovative work behavior. Our framework also advocates for the promotion of effective leader behavior and employees’ perceptions of fairness which support innovative work behaviour. In practical terms, organizations could train their supervisors to exhibit more transformational leader behaviors as they stimulate idea generation and implementation. Further, organizations could roll out training focusing on developing better exchange relationships between leaders and their followers. Additionally, organizations, aware of the impact of employee perception of fairness on innovative work behavior, could develop fair and equitable procedures or introduce interventions targeting the development of required behavior which in turn could stimulate innovative work behavior. Future research could benefit by focusing on how specific dimensions of transformational leadership influence employee innovative work behavior at the individual, team and organizational levels. Furthermore, future research could focus on how individual differences impact leadership, perceptions of fairness and innovative work behaviour.