Unlocking Innovation in Hierarchical Contexts: Extending Componential Theory Through Employee Perspective

ABSTRACT Innovation is routinely named as a determinant of HR and organizational competitiveness, yet how the employees expected to produce it read the conditions surrounding them in the workplace has attracted little scrutiny—least of all in steeply hierarchical, non‐Western workplaces. The omission matters because the dominant frameworks were assembled in contexts where deference to authority is weak, and their portability to high‐power‐distance organizations cannot be assumed. Working from an interpretivist position, this article reconstructs how employees in three Saudi Arabian hospitality and tourism organizations understood the possibilities and limits of innovation between 2014 and 2015, shortly before Vision 2030 recast the sector as an instrument of economic diversification. Amabile's Componential Theory framed a reflexive thematic analysis of 148 employee comments drawn from the organizations' own digital platforms and 31 semi‐structured interviews. Five themes—cultural constraint, leadership and power, recognition deficits, structural and procedural obstruction and work group conditions—press against three assumptions embedded in the theory. Psychological safety behaved not as one support among several but as a floor: below it, resources, reward schemes and idea platforms carried no observable effect. Leadership encouragement changed register, operating less as a facilitating influence than as a precondition for implementation. The environmental components also bore unevenly on the two phases: employees readily generated ideas, while cultural and structural constraints were concentrated where those ideas required implementation. The study specifies boundary conditions for a theory whose scope conditions have rarely been made explicit, provides an employee‐centred account of Saudi tourism immediately before Vision 2030, and demonstrates the value of reading organizationally generated digital commentary alongside interviews. In practice, it points toward treating psychological safety as infrastructure rather than climate, rebuilding attribution and recognition and governing ideation separately from implementation.