Innovative work behaviour: Investigating the nature and facilitation of vocational teachers‘ contributions to innovation development
Year: 2012
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The goal of this thesis was to contribute to an understanding of the nature and facilitation of vocational teachers’ innovative work behaviour as a key element for the development of innovations in vocational colleges. Innovative work behaviour encompasses all physical and cognitive work activities employees carry out in their work context, either solitarily or in a social setting, to accomplish a set of tasks required for the development of an innovation. Innovations are new and potentially useful products or processes that address the problems and challenges of a particular work context and help to maintain or improve the current state of this context. Five prerequisite tasks for innovation development, that is, opportunity exploration, idea generation, idea promotion, idea realization, and reflection are distinguished. In this thesis a theoretical conceptualization of innovative work behaviour as a dynamic, context-bound construct is presented. This conceptualization advances previous work by taking into account the timely and socio-cultural interdependence of employees’ work activities, the fundamental relation of work activities to a particular work context, and the importance of reflective and social work activities for innovation and professional development. The thesis encompasses five empirical and theoretical contributions that complementarily investigate the measurement and facilitation of innovative work behaviour. In particular, it is illustrated how innovative work behaviour can be measured as a dynamic, context-bound construct by grounding measurement on work activities employees have carried out in their work context during an episode of innovation development and by integrating the social and reflective components of innovation development. Furthermore, the studies with vocational teachers showed that innovations and individual contributions to their development represent a practically relevant aspect in vocational colleges and in vocational teachers’ work context for tackling problems and challenges inside and outside the classroom and for providing adequate job preparation for students. Finally, insight is provided into possibilities to facilitate vocational teachers’ innovative work behaviour. In this respect, it seemed that in vocational colleges the initiation of innovative work behaviour is driven by an interaction of contextual problems and opportunities with vocational teachers’ personal goals and needs. In addition, findings indicated that the performance of innovative work behaviour is determined by characteristics of professionalism as well as by vocational teachers’ intrinsic motivation, their self-directed individual perceptions, and the available social support.
DOI: 10.5283/epub.26492
Author: Messmann, Gerhard
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W990933969