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Ideas in place
week, I go to this colleague when I have an idea”) based on (Parise, 2007). Based on the participant's self-reported organizational affiliation, the participants selected the specific colleagues from a complete list of employees of their department. We then calculated the sum of outgoing interactions that employees had, hence creating a count variable. While we did not alter the variable itself, we took the participants' opportunity for the event (idea sharing interaction) to occur into account in the analysis in the form of an offset variable (actual weekly work hours). We chose self- reported data for several arguments. First, what a worker reports as innovative work behavior may be based on more complete information (e.g., history, context, intention) than is accessible to the supervisor. Thus, employees’ awareness of these situational and more subtle influences makes employees particularly suited to self-report data (Shalley et al., 2009) and more likely to be a more precise depiction than by a supervisor. Also, previous studies have found that self-reported measures of innovation correlate with supervisor ratings (Axtell et al., 2000).
Idea implementation (IDI) was measured with three items from the Innovative Work Behavior scale (Scott & Bruce, 1994), e.g., “I investigate and secure funds needed to implement new ideas”. The scale’s internal reliability was beyond the necessary threshold of .70 (Nunnally, 1967): αIMP = .78.
Control variables. We controlled for gender (0 = female, 1 = male), level of education (1 = elementary school to 6 = university degree), tenure, work hours and role (1 = employee, 2 = middle management, 3 = executive level). Gender was included to account for the skewed (though representative) male-female distribution in the sample; level of education was included as a standard control variable; tenure has been found to affect employee’s communication (Zenger & Lawrence, 1989); amount of work hours was required to be included as an exposure variable in the model for idea sharing and thus also in the model for idea implementation as a control variable; role needed to be accounted for as it represents discretionary power of employees and their centrality in an organization (Lincoln & Miller, 1979).
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