Exploring the antecedents of employee innovative behavior: Learning goal orientation is key

Innovation is an important strategic imperative that is necessary for organizations to effectively navigate the increasingly tumultuous market conditions they face. As such, it is critical that organizations have clarity about how to best foster employee innovative behavior, namely, idea generation, idea promotion, and idea realization. Disperse research has identified a number of antecedents of employee innovative behavior. However there is little clarity on the relative importance of these antecedents and if there is an antecedent that is most important for bringing about employee innovative behavior. In this field study, the researchers included three different acknowledged antecedents of employee innovative behavior in the same model (namely employee goal orientation, leadership effectiveness, and psychological safety) to determine the degree of their relative importance to employee innovative behavior. The findings revealed that only the employees’ personal characteristics of learning goal orientation had significant relationships with the three different types of innovative behavior (idea generation, idea promotion, and idea realization). These findings should serve to elevate the precision of the theoretical and practical attention given to the commonly studied antecedents of innovative behavior.