With this study we wanted to explore how employee’s perception of a specific HRM practice (PTI) may result into a certain employee behavior (innovative behavior). PTI is hereby seen as a challenge stressor that holds the opportunity for growth and development. In particular, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the hypothesized positive relationship between PTI and innovative behavior and the mediating role of knowledge sharing. Moreover, we investigated the moderating roles of self-efficacy and coworker support as coping strategies on the relationship between PTI, knowledge sharing and innovative behavior.
First, we hypothesized a positive relationship between PTI and innovative behavior, which we did not find support for. A possible explanation of the non-significant findings is that a lot of trainings tend to focus on routine tasks, specific
21 knowledge, safety, or the performance in the current job. However, innovative behavior is characterized by combining elements in a new way, which requires the ability to think differently, question routines and trying out different ways (de Brabandere & Iny, 2010), rather than learning how to perform processes according to standard operating procedures. In addition, industry-specific factors of the sample may have influenced the results, given that the metal industry is a relatively stable environment, where innovative behavior may not be as required as in other industries, where fierce competition is more prominent. Another possible explanation may lie in the nature of the too distal concepts PTI and innovative behavior, which most likely made it impossible to account for a significant relationship between them. PTI is referred to as employee perceptions of certain organizational treatment, while innovative behavior is an actual employee performance. Even though PTI embraces the opportunity of growth and development, it represents a stressor and entails frequent and intense training requirements, which may overload employees. Thus, PTI may not leave enough time and space to experiment and engage in creative thinking, which would let innovative behavior flourish (Andrews & Smith, 1996). Due to the conceptual distance of PTI and IB, we aimed to investigate whether there would be a possible mediator explaining the relationship or other factors (moderators) that would influence this relationship.
Second, we hypothesized that knowledge sharing would mediate the relationship between PTI and innovative behavior, which we did not find support for. A possible explanation may be grounded into the yet inconclusive findings with regards to the relationship between PTI and knowledge sharing. While Kuvaas, et al. (2012) found a positive significant relationship between PTI and knowledge sharing, the results of the study of Buch, et al. (2015) indicate that this relationship only holds under the influence of certain moderators (perceived supervisory support and perceived job autonomy). The inconclusive findings on this relationship may be due to a possible curvilinear association between PTI and knowledge sharing (Buch, et al., 2015).
Moreover, even if PTI and knowledge sharing were related, perhaps knowledge sharing itself would not lead to innovative behavior, as it has to be applied or transferred in order to do so. However, in our study we operationalized
22 knowledge sharing only as a two-way exchange of knowledge without any focus on the application or transfer. This possible explanation is in line with other research findings, which indicate that knowledge sharing and its application (knowledge management capacity) play a mediating role between strategic human resource practices and innovative performance (Chen & Huang, 2009).
Innovation, however, requires both creating and implementing novel ideas (Kaufmann, 1993). This means that that even though knowledge sharing may lead to the creation of new ideas, it does not mean that it leads to the implementation of the ideas. The same conditions favoring creation of novel ideas often impede the idea-implementation process (Miron-Spektor, Erez, & Naveh, 2011), highlighting the complexity of the innovation process and the influence of several other contextual factors.
Third, we hypothesized that self-efficacy moderates the mediating effect of knowledge sharing in the PTI and innovative behavior relationship. This hypothesis was partially supported. Self-efficacy is indeed a significant moderator of the relationship between PTI and knowledge sharing. The higher self-efficacy, the more positive the relationship between PTI and knowledge sharing. Our results indicate that when stress and organizational demands are high (i.e., PTI), high levels of individual self-efficacy help employees to cope with these demands.
This results into increased knowledge sharing behavior. In contrast, the lower self-efficacy, the more negative the relationship between PTI and knowledge sharing.
This indicates that individuals with low levels of self-efficacy do not have the necessary personal resources to cope with the demands and rather pull back, which results into a decrease of knowledge sharing (see Figure 2). If this is the case, PTI may push the more self-efficacious employees to actually share knowledge and engage in knowledge exchange, while low self-efficacious employees in a high PTI context will experience difficulties to cope with it and therefore not engage in proactive behaviors.
Consequently, our results indicate that the belief in one’s own ability and skills helps to cope with stress and organizational demands for training, learning and development. According to our results, self-efficacy as a personal resource affects the confidence to overcome difficult situations and in addition also strengthens the motivation to share knowledge. This is in line with Shaari, et al.
23 (2014), who acknowledged self-efficacy as an influencing factor for knowledge sharing awareness. In addition, the moderating role of self-efficacy also speaks to the importance of taking individual differences into account when hypothesizing relationships between perceptions of HR practices and employee outcomes.
However, self-efficacy is not a significant moderator in the full model. This is linked to the fact that we did not find support for a mediation role of knowledge sharing (see Hypothesis 2).
Fourth, we hypothesized that coworker support moderates the mediating role of knowledge sharing in the PTI and innovative behavior relationship, which we did not find support for. In fact, it seems that not coworker support, but perceived supervisory support is fundamentally important for innovative behavior. This was highlighted by the fact that perceived supervisory support is correlated with most of the outcome variables, and also in particular significantly related to innovative behavior. This underpins the critical role of the supervisor to foster knowledge sharing and innovative behavior at the workplace. Research shows that a positive supervisor-subordinate relationship as well as outcome expectations are factors that influence employees innovative behavior (Yuan & Woodman, 2010). Leaders who require from their employees new and non-conventional solutions can foster employee innovative behavior. Moreover, they may influence the innovative behavior by providing positive social recognition for innovative employees and can enhance the extent to which employee see themselves as innovative (Yuan &
Woodman, 2010). Supervisory support was found to be in particular important for creative idea generation and idea implementation (Škerlavaj, Černe, & Dysvik, 2014).
In addition, some general findings need to be discussed as well. We found that age was negatively related to innovative behavior. This is in contrast to other researchers findings in which age influenced neither the quantity nor the quality of ideas submitted (Verworn, 2009)One explanation for our results may be the high tenure in our sample. This could suggest that older employees also stayed very long in the company, which may influence the routine of acting according to standard operating procedures and the ability to see processes in a different light (Lundmark & Björkman, 2011). Moreover, we found self-efficacy to be
24 negatively related to innovative behavior, which is in contrast to the existing research opinion (Hammond, et al., 2011; Ng & Lucianetti, 2016; Tierney &
Farmer, 2011). It may indicate that self-efficacy follows a curvilinear relationship with innovative behavior, which suggests that too much self-efficacy would result into negative display of innovative behavior. This is in line with the research stream on the possible negative effects of efficacy. It indicates that high self-efficacy can lead to overconfidence in one’s abilities (Stone, 1994) and therefore affect the resource allocation negatively, i.e. time and effort, which negatively influences performance (Vancouver, Thompson, Williams, & Murphy, 2001).