Innovation climate for individual motivation and innovation performance: Is innovative behavior a missing link?

This study empirically examines the impact of individual motivation on innovation performance, where innovative behavior serves as a mediating construct, and discusses whether the innovation climate has a moderating effect. This study combines the Cognitive Evaluation Theory and behavioral performance to develop a new theoretical method for explaining the relationships between individual motivation, innova-tive behavior, and innovation performance. Data collected via a field study of 250 subjects who participated in a science and technology competition were analyzed using a PLS-SEM model. Barron and Kenny's media-tion test and the bootstrapping method were used to evaluate the model and confirm the mediation and moderation effects, respectively. Robustness checks were conducted to exclude nonlinearity and heterogene-ity in the model. The results show that individual motivation positively promotes innovation performance, in which innovative behavior plays an intermediary role, and that innovation climate moderates the relation-ship between innovative behavior and innovation performance. According to the results of this field study, stimulators concerning motivation and climate should be primarily considered by managers to boost innova-tion performance. (c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. on behalf of Journal of Innovation & Knowledge. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)