The necessity of job design for employee creativity and innovation

Job design is a favourable antecedent of discretionary innovative work behaviours (IWB). Although multiple job characteristics (i.e., job demands and job resources) define the work environment, only a few are supposed to be of dominant and critical importance for employee creativity and innovation. By complementing the common sufficient causality with necessity theorizing, we explored the creativity-enabling and innovation-enabling nature of the Job Demands – Control – Support (JDCS) model components. A multi-method approach (i.e., multiple regression, relative importance analysis, and necessary condition analysis) was applied in a comparative contextualized research design (i.e., a three-study field survey research) involving 358 employees and 86 supervisors from an EU member country. The converging results showed that without experiencing vitally important support from a supervisor, enhancing other job characteristics will not lead to high levels of subordinate’s IWB. The present research also recognized work autonomy as an additional task-related critical success factor, which was only necessary when considering employee innovation as a frequently occurring time-lagged outcome. Contrary to our theory-derived assumptions, job complexity as a representative type of job demand was not necessary for IWB. Practitioners may benefit from the findings because they can better understand the prerequisites and priorities for enabling employees’ IWB via job design.