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The central role of innovation in the long-term survival of organizations (Ancona & Caldwell, 1987) provokes continuing interest among social scientists and practitioners alike. Since the foundation of innovation is ideas, and it is people who "develop, carry, react to, and modify ideas" (Van de Ven, 1986: 592), the study of what motivates or enables individual innovative behavior is critical. However, West and Farr noted that "there has been scant attention paid to innovation at the individual and group levels" (1989: 17). The present study integrated a number of independent streams of research on the antecedents of creativity, innovation, and organizational climate to develop and test a theoretical model of individual innovative behavior.
Van de Ven (1986) noted that one of the central problems in the management of innovation is the management of attention. Managing attention is difficult because individuals gradually adapt to their environments in such a way that their awareness of need deteriorates and their action thresholds reach a level at which only crisis can stimulate action. A number of theorists have suggested that climate may channel and direct both attention and activities toward innovation (e.g., Amabile, 1988; Isaksen, 1987; Kanter, 1988). Following James, Hater, Gent, and Bruni, we defined climate as individual cognitive representations of the organizational setting "expressed in terms that reflect psychologically meaningful interpretations of the situation" (1978: 786). The model guiding this study draws on the social interactionist approach and posits that leadership, work group relations and problem-solving style affect individual innovative behavior directly and indirectly through perceptions of a "climate for innovation."
The study setting was a research and development subunit. The organizational literature has tended to treat R&D as a special case with little relevance to other types of functional areas within organizations. Because the central tasks of R&D traditionally have involved unstructured problem solving, and unstructured problem solving is becoming increasingly common throughout organizations (Walton, 1985), the study of R&D professionals may have substantial relevance for promoting innovation among all organizational participants.
The present study also investigated whether the type of job or task an individual is engaged in influences the posited relationships. Task routineness and the amount of discretion granted individuals in task performance have previously been reported to moderate the relationship between climate and...