Innovative Work Behaviour: Concept and Measurement

Although social scientists and psychologists increasingly use the concept of Innovative Work Behaviour (IWB), the concept and its measure have not been thoroughly discussed and analysed. This article develops in detail the concept of IWB and discusses the distinct character of the concept vis-à-vis concepts like workplace creativity, intrapreneurship, personal initiative and organisational citizenship behaviour. In a second section we review the indicators of validity of the different IWB measures used and consider research results from a mixed method validity research of the IWB measure for non-knowledge workers. We conclude that the IWB concept could contain a dimensionality distinguishing between extra- and intra-role IWB or between incremental and radical IWB, as opposed to the dimensions proposed by the literature. Therefore, we propose that the current IWB items should be reworded and further analysis is needed on the topic.status: publishe