Chinese strategic emerging industry has been developed rapidly in recent years. As the important guarantee and intellectual support required in the development of this kind industry, enterprise technology innovation talents have become the most significant strength to promote the enterprise technology and industry progress. Therefore, how to guide and motivate their creativity ability at the most extent has come to be a vital scientific question. In order to search for the improvement path to such employees’ innovation ability, the current study mainly investigated the effect of both psychological capital and organizational support on innovation and silence behavior within technical innovation personnel. Through the regression analysis of 350 questionnaires, our results showed that both psychological capital and organizational support had worthy negative effect on their silence behavior and positive effect on their innovation behavior, respectively; meanwhile, psychological capital and organizational support showed interaction effect to both innovation and silence behavior within technical innovation personnel. According to our results, in order to better motivate employees’ innovation ability, corporations should take supportive policies and improve employees’ psychological capital.
In recent years, the strategic emerging industry has been developed rapidly. As an industry with characteristics such as knowledge and technology-intensive, less consumption of material resources, growth potential and good comprehensive benefits, strategic emerging industry is based on major technological breakthrough and development needs, and plays a significant leading role in the long-term economic and social development. The talent guarantee and intellectual support are required in the development of the industry, where the technical innovation personnel’s complementary communication and innovation ability are the most important impelling force to promote its development. As a vital source of technological progress, innovative behavior refers to all the behaviors that show in individuals when generation of new ideals, composition, promotion and in the process of application [
Based on Trait Activation Theory, the predictive performance of individual characteristics to its behaviors is affected by the characteristics associated with situational factors. From the perspective of organization, Gu pointed out that organizational support was an important condition for employees’ creativity, and perceived organizational support was an important perspective to indicate the relationship between supporting organization situation and innovative behavior of employees [
However, in the real organization, behavior of employee silence becomes an important factor that hinders technological development and employee innovation. Pinder & Harlos pointed out that employee silence meant that when employees had the ability to improve the current situation of the organization, but they reserved the evaluation to all aspects of their organization, including behavioral, cognitive or emotional [
Many scholars have actively explored the reasons for the formation of employee silence, such as individual character traits, leadership characteristics [
Therefore, as a particular social group, the innovative technical talents were investigated in current study targets. Combined with the theory of characteristic excitation, we will investigate the key factor that influence their innovative and silence behavior, and analyze the effect of interaction of the organizational support and psychological capital on the innovative technical employee’s innovative and silence behavior deeply. Our research, on one hand, makes up for the deficiencies in the current theory; on the other hand, provides some guidance for improving the innovation capacity of enterprise technology innovation talents, thereby providing important talents support for the rapid development of the strategic emerging industries.
Luthans defines psychological capital as a positive state of mind manifested in the process of individual growth and development. And the positive state of mind is expressed in four specific aspects made up of self-efficacy, optimism, hope and tenacity [
Studies have shown that individuals with rich psychological capital will work better, more susceptible to organization and leadership awards, more likely to offer advice and suggestions for organization, and have lower level silent behavior. Employees with strong psychological capital dare to put forward their views, and also are able to withstand the trouble and setbacks they encountered after telling the truth; at the same time, they will take organizational things as their own business, do not care about personal gains and losses temporarily, and are willing to speak out the truth for organizational development. Combined with the Conservation of Resource Theory, if the individual has sufficient resources to mitigate and compensate for work stress and insecurity, it is possible to reduce or prevent negative results effectively. Thus, psychological capital is a positive state of mind manifested in the process of individual growth and development process. As a valuable individual resource, it can make individuals have a positive attribution in the face of difficulties, and an indomitable spirit to analyze and overcome problems with an upbeat manner. This can mitigate and compensate for the “speak” to employees of stress and insecurity to some extent, thereby reducing the generation of employees’ silence behavior [
Based on the above descriptions, we hypothesis that:
H1a: Psychological capital can promote technical innovative personnel’s innovative behavior.
H1b: Psychological capital can restrain technical innovative personnel’s silence behavior.
Since Eisenberger et al. put forward the concept of organizational support, domestic and foreign scholars performed extensive research based on this concept. Organizational support refers to a general view of employees that how their organizations treat their contribution and interests [
Bowen and Blackmon believe that if employees had a premonition that the views and opinions they put forward can get support from the other members of the organization, they tended to express their views. Otherwise, they would choose to be silence [
Edmondson found that if the team leader could establish the atmosphere in favor of “advices” within the organization, such as actively encouraging employees to express their views, creating incentives for reform and advice, providing psychological sense of security when employees make suggestions, then employees could give more attention confronted job problems and own courage to put forward their views [
Based on the above descriptions, we hypothesis that:
H2a Organizational support can promote technical innovative personnel’s innovative behavior.
H2b Organizational support can restrain technical innovative personnel’s innovative behavior.
Based on Trait Activation Theory, the predictive power of individual characteristics to individual behavior is affected by situational factors associated with the characteristics. The more external situation is relevant to individual characteristics, the easier it is to stimulate individual characteristics and exhibit certain behaviors; and if the outside world situation is irrelevant or contrary to the individual characteristics, individual characteristics will be suppressed without showing a certain behavior. Since the expression of traits has inherent incentives for individuals, so people tend to focus on and find those situational factors associated with their own traits. Based on Trait Activation Theory, this paper argues that psychological capital and organizational support have interaction effect on employees’ innovative and silence behavior. Organizations with strong atmosphere of organizational support can help to break employees’ pessimism, reduce the pessimists’ sense of isolation and promote the development of enhancing employees’ optimism spirit, so as to stimulate their positive attitudes and behavior [
Based on the above descriptions, we hypothesis that:
H3a: Psychological capital and organizational support have interaction effect on technological innovation personnel’s innovative behavior.
H3b: Psychological capital and organizational support have interaction effect on technological innovation personnel’s silence behavior.
In order to ensure the rigor of the study design, this study selected four enterprises of strategic emerging industries. They are mainly distributed in Beijing and Hebei region. Follow the principle of random sampling, the sample for the study was drawn from technology innovation employees in these enterprises. Out of the total 380 questionnaires distributed, 370 copies were returned and 350 of them were valid. In the 350 valid samples, 58.8% male, 41.2% female; minimum education is secondary vocational school and below and the highest is doctor. Including specialist and below account for12.2%, 29.3% of bachelor, 47.6%of master, and doctors account for 10.3%. The minimum work experience for 1 year and up to more than 10 years.
Psychological capital: The paper uses the scale of psychological capital developed by Luthans [
Organizational support: The scale used in this paper was compiled by Gu [
Innovative behavior: Innovation Behavior Scale developed by Zhou & George [
Silence behavior: The paper uses the scale compiled by Zheng et al. [
Control variable: Control variables include gender, educational background and work experience. Specifically, gender: 1 = female, 2 = male; educational background: 1 = “secondary vocational school and under”, 2 = “bachelor”, 3 = “master”, 4 = “doctor”; working experience: 1 = “1 years and under”, 2 = “2 - 5 years”, 3 = “6 - 9 years”, 4 = “>10 years”.
In the formal sample survey, we used confirmatory factor analysis to test variables’ discriminant validity. We can see from
This study further analyzed the influence of organizational support on technological innovation employees’ silence behavior and innovative behavior, and the results are shown in
Model | χ2/df | CFI | NFI | TLI | RMSEA |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Reference Model | 2.68 | 0.95 | 0.97 | 0.96 | 0.04 |
Single-Factor Model | 6.89 | 0.56 | 0.57 | 0.59 | 0.37 |
Two-factor model | 6.72 | 0.63 | 0.59 | 0.56 | 0.27 |
Three-factor model | 6.17 | 0.73 | 0.71 | 0.69 | 0.19 |
Mean | SD | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Gender | 1.59 | 0.493 | ||||||
2. Educational background | 2.58 | 0.857 | −0.045 | |||||
3. Work experience | 2.14 | 1.053 | −0.223** | −0.141* | ||||
4. Psychological capital | 3.85 | 1.064 | −0.025 | 0.120* | 0.020 | |||
5. Organizational support | 3.31 | 1.092 | −0.100 | −0.024 | 0.001 | 0.365*** | ||
6. Innovative behavior | 4.16 | 0.826 | 0.012 | 0.134* | −0.137* | 0.660*** | 0.590*** | |
7. Silence behavior | 1.53 | 0.363 | −0.084 | −0.085 | 0.090 | −0.203*** | −0.145** | −0.215*** |
Notes: ***p < 0.001; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05.
the critical value of 10 which shows that the model does not have the serious problem of collinearity, and the analysis of the model is acceptable.
Model 1 - 3 in
Innovative behavior Silence behavior | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Model1 | Model 2 | Model 3 | Model 4 | Model 5 | Model 6 | ||
Constant | 4.105 | 4.071 | 4.054 | 1.659 | 1.657 | 1.678 | |
Control variable | |||||||
Gender | −0.010 | 0.043 | 0.046 | −0.073 | −0.086 | −0.095 | |
Educational background | 0.116* | 0.069 | 0.069 | −0.079 | −0.063 | −0.063 | |
Work experience | −0.123* | −0.118* | −0.122* | 0.062 | 0.062 | 0.074 | |
Independent variable | |||||||
Psychological capital | 0.502*** | 0.500*** | −0.163** | −0.156** | |||
Organizational support | 0.413*** | 0.418*** | −0.096* | −0.111* | |||
Psychological capital X Organizational support | 0.054* | −0.161** | |||||
R2 | 0.032 | 0.601 | 0.604 | 0.018 | 0.065 | 0.090 | |
Adjusted R2 | 0.023 | 0.595 | 0.597 | 0.009 | 0.050 | 0.072 | |
F | 3.422* | 92.061*** | 77.397*** | 1.924 | 4.246** | 5.035*** | |
DR2 | 0.032 | 0.569 | 0.003 | 0.018 | 0.047 | 0.025 | |
F | 3.422* | 217.769*** | 2.227* | 1.924 | 7.605*** | 8.458** | |
Notes: ***p < 0.001; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05.
standard deviation plot, at a high level of psychological capital level, the higher the degree of organizational support, then the innovative behavior will be better. If the level of psychological capital is higher, the level of organizational support is low, contrary the innovation ability of technology innovation staff will be reduced.
Model 4 - 6 shows the influence of psychological capital and organizational support on silence behavior. Model 5 shows that after introducing the variables of psychological capital and organizational support, the β of psychological capital is −0.163 (p < 0.01), the β of organizational support is −0.096 (p < 0.05). It shows that both psychological capital and organizational support have significant inhibitory effect on employee silence behavior, and the influence of psychological capital is greater than that of organizational support. Model 6 shows that after introducing the interaction term of psychological capital and organizational support and found that the correlation coefficient of the model was −0.161 (p < 0.01). It shows that psychological capital and organizational support to some extent on the behavior of employees will also have silent interaction.
The current study validated the effects of psychological capital and organizational support on employees’ silence behavior and innovative behavior. It verified the interaction between the psychological capital and organizational support. As for the research results, the article will show more detailed discussion in the following paragraphs. The study showed that the silence behavior of technical innovation employees is connected to their organization and their personal factors. Silence behavior is considered as the obstacle of decision-making quality because of its potential damage to the organization. Employees choose silence as a safe way to keep their jobs. There are some reasons for employees to keep silence, like being afraid of the revenge of their leaders or the tease by their fellows. Good organization support provides a sense of psychological safety and then motivates the psychological capital in this way, therefore the employees are pleasant to provide lot of suggestions actively. Besides, good organization support can improve the loyalty of the employees, make them consider the development of their organization and increase their motivation. For these reason, employees would like to express themselves and provide useful information rather than keep silence. From the perspective of employees, individuals with good psychological capital are more likely to face the problem and then figure out how to solve the problem personally or cooperatively. You need confidence and courage to speak out your idea, which is supported by the study. Organization support and psychological capital have obvious effect on innovational behavior of technical innovation personnel. They have strong concept of innovation and self-efficacy when supported by better organization. They will have superior psychological capital over time. Thus they can get more concept of innovation and solution to a new problem in the course of their work. In the meantime, they are able to introduce their innova-
tion ideas to other people or organizations in order to decrease their own or others silence behavior.
Due to the limitations of subjective and objective reasons, our research has some drawbacks as follows: Firstly, the distributions of our samples aren’t wide enough. We mainly investigate the enterprise sector employees in Beijing and Hebei region. We hope that future research will be able to broaden the coverage of the survey, and to enhance the universality of the research conclusions. Secondly, although this study is conducted to investigate the student class and reduce the concerns of others, as far as possible to reduce the errors, because of the use of self-assessment method, and there are still some deficiencies in the data obtained. In order to better test the basic hypothesis of this research, follow-up study can be considered as far as possible by using self rating and assessment of his combination of way to obtain sample data, and to take proper account of the collection of time series data and using method of longitudinal study to ensure the reliability of the conclusion of the study.
Yunchun Yu,Quan Liu, (2016) The Effect of Psychological Capital and Organizational Support on Innovational Behavior and Silence Behavior of Technical Innovation Personnel in Strategic Emerging Industry. American Journal of Industrial and Business Management,06,732-740. doi: 10.4236/ajibm.2016.66067