Looking for motivational routes for employee-generated innovation: Employees' scouting behavior

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of employees' job and organizational engagement on their scouting behavior, which refers to employees' voluntary communicative efforts to acquire and circulate task and managerial information. The study investigates the causal networks between employees' creative work engagement, intrinsic motivation, empowering leadership, and quality of organization-employee relationship, as well as their influence on employee scouting. A web-based survey of 306 current employees working full-time at a semi-conductor company in Italy explored the antecedents of the employees' communicative behavior of scouting. Results suggest that employees who are motivated to be creative for their job are likely to engage in scouting behavior. Those who perceive empowering leadership and a high quality of relationship with their company also turned out to be engaged actively in scouting, and relative impacts of job and organizational engagement on scouting were also found. Theoretical and practical implications for future research are discussed.