The savvy and cheerful employee innovation champions: The roles of political skill and trait‐positive affect in employees' championing and salary levels

Abstract

As successful innovations depend on how much support an innovation can receive, champion and promote, role theories have investigated characteristics of certain individuals, who promote innovations. Taking an employee‐driven innovation approach, this study enlarges the lens to also include nonmanagerial employees. Compared with champions and people in promotor roles, nonmanagerial employees' championing has received little attention in research. We help in filling this gap by analysing longitudinal questionnaire data from 152 employees from a Danish branch of a global IT consultancy company, who replied to all three questionnaire waves. We investigated how stable championing is across time and examined the relationship between political skills, positive affect, championing behaviour and employee salary level. The findings reveal that employees' level of championing is rather stable. Moreover, the higher level of political skill employees report to have, the more they engage in championing. High levels of positive affect strengthen this relationship between political skill and championing. Additionally, the results reveal a relationship between the level of championing behaviour and the employee's salary band level. This study adds to the extant research in champion and promoter role theories by showing that a sociopolitical approach is also relevant for a broader range of employees.