Date of Conferral

2021

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Management

Advisor

Stephanie Hoon

Abstract

In hierarchical structured organizations, leaders often assume that innovation will happen randomly but lack an understanding of what leadership qualities contribute to employees’ innovativeness. Innovation is a requirement in the current business marketplace to stay relevant. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative case study is to explore how the convergence of leader behaviors, employees’ behaviors, organization structure, and organization culture influence employee innovativeness in a hierarchical organization. The overarching research question is from an employee and leader perspective how do leaders’ behaviors, organizational structure, and organizational culture influence employee innovation? Leveraging the conceptional framework of the innovative blueprint created by C. Brooke Dobni, an analysis of 18 interviews with healthcare employees located in the pacific northwest will be shared. The study identified 9 themes that leaders influence in enabling an innovative environment. The 9 themes were sharing ideas, support from peers and customers, being surrounded by people who think differently, alignment to organization priorities, questioning ideas and solutions, environment of curiosity and failure, and manager expectations and trust. The results of this study provided practical, actionable themes for leaders to implement that enabled innovation and can impact positive social change by shifting leader behaviors to proactively support employee innovation.

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