Individual-Level Factors are Significantly More Predictive of Employee Innovativeness Than Job-Specific or Organization-Level Factors: Results From a Quantitative Study of Health Professionals

Driving innovation in health care: exploring the impact of ambidextrous leadership on creative performance among frontline health professionals in Norway

BACKGROUND

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on enhancing frontline health professionals' ability to think and act innovatively, also known as their creative performance. However, previous research has had two limitations. First, only a few leadership styles and their associations with this capability have been examined. Second, there has been a lack of research on identifying potential process mediators and examining their role in the relationship between leadership styles and the professionals' capability. To address this knowledge gap, our study investigates the impact of ambidextrous leadership, a relatively new leadership style, on frontline health professionals' creative performance. Additionally, we explore whether frontline health professionals' learning orientation (an individual factor) and relationship learning (an organizational factor) act as process mediators in this association. No previous research has focused on these relationships. Thus, the study offers a unique contribution to health services research.

METHODS

This is a cross-sectional study with a convenience sample of N = 258 health professionals in nine Norwegian municipalities. The results of this study were analyzed using PLS-SEM with SmartPLS 3 software. The study examined both direct and indirect relationships through bootstrapping.

RESULTS

The results reveal a positive link between health professionals' creative performance and ambidextrous leadership [Formula: see text] = 0.224). Both relationship learning and learning orientation were found to operate as complementary process-mediating factors between health professionals' creative performance and ambidextrous leadership. The strength of the two individual relationships that constitute the process-mediating factors indicates that ambidextrous leadership has a stronger impact on relationship learning than on learning orientation [Formula: see text] = 0.504 versus β = 0.276). However, when we examined the individual associations between the two factors and creative performance, the strength of the relationships was quite different. The findings reveal that learning orientation is significantly more positively associated with creative performance than relationship learning [Formula: see text] = 0.302 versus β = 0.163). Ambidextrous leadership, learning orientation, and relationship learning explain 26% (R2 = 0.262) of the variance in professionals' creative performance.

CONCLUSIONS

This study suggests that ambidextrous leadership can facilitate health professionals' creative performance directly and indirectly through the two process-mediating factors: relationship learning and learning orientation. Thus, a practical implication is the importance for health service organizations of clear awareness of the numerous advantages of having leaders who actively practice an ambidextrous leadership style.

The impact of organizational culture and leadership climate on organizational attractiveness and innovative behavior: a study of Norwegian hospital employees

BACKGROUND

In the domain of health services, little research has focused on how organizational culture, specifically internal market-oriented cultures (IMOCs), are associated with organizational climate resources, support for autonomy (SA), and whether and how IMOCs and SA are either individually or in combination related to employee perceptions of the attractiveness of the organization and their level of innovative behavior. These knowledge gaps in previous research motivated this study.

METHODS

A conceptual model was tested on a sample (N = 1008) of hospital employees. Partial least-squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to test the conceptual models, using the SmartPLS 3 software. To test the mediator effect, a bootstrapping test was used to determine whether the direct and indirect effects were statistically significant, and when combining two tests, to determine the type of mediator effect.

RESULTS

The results can be summarized as four key findings: i) organizational culture (referring to an IMOC) was positively and directly related to SA (β = 0.87) and organizational attractiveness (β = 0.45); ii) SA was positively and directly related to both organizational attractiveness (β = 0.22) and employee individual innovative behavior (β = 0.37); iii) The relationships between an IMOC, SA, and employee innovative behavior were all mediated through organizational attractiveness; and iv) SA mediated the relationship between the IMOC and organizational attractiveness as well as that between the IMOC and employee innovative behavior.

CONCLUSIONS

Organizational culture, IMOC, organizational climate resources, and SA were highly correlated and necessary drivers of employee perceptions of organizational attractiveness and their innovative behavior. Managers of hospitals should consider IMOC and SA as two organizational resources that are potentially manageable and controllable. Consequently, managers should actively invest in these resources. Such investments will lead to resource capitalization that will improve both employee perceptions of organizational attractiveness as well as their innovative behavior.