Workplace Innovation and its Relations with Organisational Performance and Employee Commitment

2012 – A large-scale survey among companies in the Netherlands demonstrates that there indeed is a positive relationship between workplace innovation and quantitative and qualitative organisational performance and commitment of employees. Yet workplace innovation measures should be more widespread in the European workplace. From the view of designing policies that help in sustaining Europe’s competitiveness, it is important that future research focusses on this question.

According to some theoretical approaches workplace innovation is the implementation of new and combined interventions in work organisation, HRM and supportive technologies, and a strategy that improves the performance of organisations and the quality of jobs. Using data from a large-scale survey among companies in the Netherlands, it is demonstrated that there indeed is a positive relationship between workplace innovation on the one hand, and quantitative and qualitative organisational performance and commitment of employees on the other. No relation was shown between workplace innovation and the risk of work stress as reported by the employer. A relatively large flexible buffer was positively related to performance, but not to employee commitment. The presence of IT to support the work processes did have a weak relation with performance but did not show to have any relation to employee commitment. The conclusion is that workplace innovation matters to performance and to people in organisations.

Reference: Oeij Peter, Steven Dhondt, Karolus Kraan, Robert Vergeer, Frank Pot. In: LLinE, Lifelong learning in Europe. Issue 4/2012.

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