신뢰 수혜와 혁신행동

Abstract

In current turbulent business environments, innovative behavior is critical to the long-term survival and growth of an organization. This study investigates the effect of being trusted by coworkers on an individual’s innovative behavior. Based on the social network perspective, we develop hypotheses regarding the effects of being trusted on employees’ innovative behavior in two dimensions of the trust relationship in a work team: competence-based trust from work-related abilities and compassion-based trust from emotional bonds between Coworkers. We also examine the moderating role of leader-member exchange differentiation (LMXD) as an upper-level context influencing trust networks and employees’ innovative behavior. For this, we collected data from 102 employees from 19 teams in 10 Korean firms and tested our research model using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Our results reveal the positive effect of receiving competence-based trust on innovative behavior. However, contrary to our expectations, being trusted in compassion-based trust relationships has no significant effect on employees’ innovative behavior. Moreover, results of this study show different moderation effects of LMXD alongside the two types of trust. All in all, LMXD mitigates the positive effects of competence-based trust but strengthens the negative effects of compassion-based trust on employees’ innovative behavior. We go on to discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.