Give and take: understanding innovative behaviour from a psychological contract perspective

ABSTRACT

Despite numerous studies, little is known about public employees’ motivation to innovate. Based on psychological contract theory, this article examines why they have different levels of motivation for innovative behaviour. Using national-scale surveys of public employees in South Korea, this study demonstrates that employees become less innovative when financially compensated as expected, but more innovative when their expectations regarding career development and well-being are met. This indicates that individual motivation for innovation varies depending on the quality of the relationship with the organization, emphasizing that the organization should make a relational commitment to employees to foster innovative behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovative behaviour
• psychological contract
• motivation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Arnold (2015) offers a detailed explanation about the similarities between low-level employees and street-level bureaucrats in innovation.

2. The grades of Korean public employees range from grade 1 (highest) to grade 9 (lowest). According to the central government’s classification, individuals with a grade of 5 or higher assume supervisory positions, such as directors, managers, or heads of teams.

3. Surveys conducted before 2020 were not integrated into the dataset due to significant differences in survey items assessing innovative behaviour; while the 2021 and 2020 surveys include the same four questions concerning innovative behaviour, the 2019 survey has only two questions assessing respondents’ innovative behaviour.

4. Two points are worth noting here with regard to the use of OLS. First, the Breusch-Pagan test results indicate the presence of heteroskedasticity in Models 1, 3, and 4 when using OLS standard errors. Therefore, I used robust standard errors in all models to address the issue of heteroskedasticity. Second, variation inflation factors (VIF) for all independent variables, except for interaction terms, are less than 3 in all models. This means that multicollinearity is not a serious concern in this study.