How reflexivity enhances organizational innovativeness: the mediation role of team support for innovation and individual commitment

Abstract

Reflexivity is a learning process that, through questioning and critically monitoring objectives and methods in use, promotes a change of habits and routines and, in so doing, fosters organizational performance and innovativeness. This paper looks at the contribution of team reflexivity to enhancing openness to innovation, and the mediating role of individual and team involvement. Specifically we tested whether affective commitment (Study 1, n=156) and a team climate of support for innovation (Study 2, n=152) facilitate reflexivity processes in promoting organizational openness to innovation. Overall, results confirmed that reflexivity enhances innovativeness, and this relationship is mediated by a high degree of involvement that increases the motivation of teammates and their engagement in innovation processes.

Keywords:

• reflexivity
• openness to innovation
• support for innovation
• team climate for innovation
• organizational commitment
• organizational learning

Notes

1 Some of the material was produced by the SPSS macro MedText (Kenny, 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Luisa Farnese

About the Authors

Maria Luisa Farnese is Assistant Professor in Work and Organizational Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy. Her current research interests include interpersonal factors involved in organizational development and innovation, such as trust, organizational culture, knowledge management processes, learning by errors.

Stefano Livi

Stefano Livi is Associate Professor in Social Psychology at the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy. His current research interests include social and cognitive factors involved in group processes and in particular in leadership, group socialization, marginalization and intergenerational transmission. These research lines are investigated using classical models of social cognition such as epistemic motivations (e.g. need for cognitive closure).