What Makes Them Tick? Employee Motives and Firm Innovation

By Henry Sauermann, Wesley M. Cohen. Management Sciences, 2010

397 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Economists studying innovation and technological change have made significant progress toward understanding firms' profit incentives as drivers of innovation. However, innovative performance in firms should also depend heavily on the pecuniary and nonpecuniary motives of the employees actually working in research and development. Using data on more than 1,700 Ph.D. scientists and engineers, we examine the relationships between individuals' motives (e.g., desire for intellectual challenge, income, or responsibility) and their innovative performance. We find that motives matter, but different motives have very different effects: Motives regarding intellectual challenge, independence, and money have a strong positive relationship with innovative output, whereas motives regarding job security and responsibility tend to have a negative relationship. We also explore possible mechanisms underlying the observed relationships between motives and performance. Although hours worked (quantity of effort) have a strong positive effect on performance, motives appear to affect innovative performance primarily via other dimensions of effort (character of effort). Finally, we find some evidence that the role of motives differs in upstream research versus downstream development.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Marketing, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/344efb318a3545c083ce9fcc8e2f93e5e17efdbd

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Citations in the corpus

Relationships Between Work Team Climate, Individual Motivation, and Creativity (2018, background): “While intrinsic motivation is reported to be related to both the quality and quantity of efforts (Cerasoli et al., 2014; Sauermann & Cohen, 2010), extrinsic motivation primarily enhances the quantity of effort and persistence (Eisenberger & Thompson, 2011).”
Proactive Personality and Creative Behavior: Examining the Role of Thriving at Work and High-Involvement HR Practices (2020, background): “Control Variables The study also included age, gender, and education as control variables, as they have been found to affect employee creative behavior in certain settings (Frosch, 2011; Sauermann & Cohen, 2010).”
Duality in Diversity: How Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Cultural Heterogeneity Relate to Firm Performance (2019, background): “Creative recombination is ultimately something that individuals do (Amabile, 1988; Sauermann and Cohen, 2010), although organizations create contexts that can facilitate or inhibit this creativity (Amabile et al.”
A Multilevel Model of Employee Innovation (2016, methodology): “Employee age and hours worked per week were used as control variables in the analyses, as each has been shown to relate to innovation (e.g., Frosch, 2011; Sauermann & Cohen, 2010).”
Exploring Managerial Mechanisms that Influence Innovative Work Behaviour: Comparing private and public employees (2014, background): “However, security and avoidance of threats limit the attention of individuals, thereby inhibiting the exploration of novel ideas and, in turn, making performed creativity less innovative (Sauermann and Cohen 2010).”
Transformational leadership and innovation in an R&D organization experiencing major change (2013, background): “Prior research into R&D environments reveals that employees look for opportunities that stimulate them intellectually and support their need to be creative (Herzog, 2008; Sauermann and Cohen, 2008).”