The Intensity of Organizational Change and the Perception of Organizational Innovativeness; with Discussion on Open Innovation

Abstract

Each individual member of an organization must recognize and lead innovation, which can be affected by human resource development (HRD) investments and organizational changes. In this study, we aimed to verify how HRD investment at the individual level relates to employee perceptions of organizational innovativeness and to examine how the intensity of organizational change, a situational factor at the organizational level, affects the relationship between HRD investment and employee perceptions of organizational innovativeness through multilevel analysis using hierarchical linear models. We performed an analysis based on the responses from 5184 workers and 125 companies where corporate-level and personal-level data were matched in a Human Capital Corporate Panel (HCCP) survey. HRD investment by employees was shown to increase the perception of organizational innovativeness. The results demonstrated that the intensity of organizational change moderated the relationship between HRD investment and the perception of organizational innovativeness. However, the stronger the organizational change intensity, the weaker the positive effect of HRD investment on the perception of organizational innovativeness. Finally, we presented theoretical and practical implications and further research tasks related to the HRD of corporations and open innovation.

Keywords

• human resource development (HRD)
• organizational innovativeness
• organizational change
• open innovation
• hierarchical linear model
• multilevel analysis