Ambidextrous Relationships and Social Capability as Employee Well-Being: The Secret Sauce for Research and Development and Sustainable Innovation Performance.

Lucía Muñoz-Pascual,Jesús Galende

doi:10.3390/ijerph17093072

Abstract

This study examines the effects that ambidextrous relationships, i.e., oriented relationships within a firm towards the development of exploitation activities and oriented relationships towards the development of exploration activities, have on employee performance in terms of creativity, research and development (R&D), and sustainable innovation performance. We contend that informal relationships affect employee creativity and R&D. However, formal relationships affect employee creativity and sustainable innovation performance. The purpose of this study is to inject new positive relationships into firms by examining ambidextrous relationships and the moderating role of social capability in the relationships–innovation effect. We empirically tested our hypotheses by using multisource data collected from 245 Spanish firms across 14 industries. Our structural equation models suggest that these two types of relationship predict employee creativity, which in turn increases sustainable innovation performance and R&D. The results reveal that the effects between informal relationships and creativity are stronger, as are the effects between formal relationships and sustainable innovation performance. A multigroup structural analysis also reveals that effects between informal and formal relationships, employee creativity, R&D, and sustainable innovation performance are stronger within firms that have employees with high social capability. The efforts and investments made in employee social capital support the development of new ideas, R&D, and innovation success. Support is provided for an ambidextrous Human Resource Management (HRM) approach which is relevant for innovation, and several practical recommendations and implementation guidelines for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are provided. This study provides a plausible explanation of two important management mechanisms for enhancing creativity—R&D and sustainable innovation performance. Relationships are malleable, and this study suggests that fostering formal and informal relationships might hold the key to sustainable innovation performance and unlocking desirable employee behavior.

Highlights

Firms from industrialized countries are experiencing constant changes in the competitive context that leads to the strengthening of certain factors, mainly those focused on the innovation
Following the study by Gratton and Ghoshal [8] concerning human capital dimensions as antecedents of innovation, this study examines the impact of social capital on creativity, on sustainable innovation performance, and on research and development (R&D) projects
A latent variable is an unobservable construct that is assumed by the researcher, which can only be measured using observable variables [22] in the case of creativity structural equation modeling (SEM) models allow the use of multiple measures to represent the construct and control the specific measurement error of each variable, i.e., the researcher can evaluate the validity of each measured construct (2) Another important characteristic of SEM is that it provides a set of indices that determine whether the proposed theoretical structure provides a good fit to the empirical data

Summary

Introduction

Firms from industrialized countries are experiencing constant changes in the competitive context that leads to the strengthening of certain factors, mainly those focused on the innovation. The main action is to invest in the construction of technological capabilities and relationships offered for the generation of ideas, knowledge, and skills necessary to develop new products [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 3072; doi:10.3390/ijerph17093072 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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