Employees' Innovative Work Behaviour and Organisational Climate in Healthcare

Purpose - Nowadays innovation is vital in Healthcare (HC) and HC delivery. It represents a driving force in the quest to balance cost containment and healthcare quality. Despite the increasing importance of innovation in HC organizations, the research on the topic appears still limited. What remains little explored are the conditions for, or determinants of innovation in HC organizations. Obviously several factors stimulate and affect the process of innovation. These factors regard both internal and external features of an HC organization. However since the foundation of innovation is ideas, and it is people who "develop, carry, react to, and modify ideas" (Van de Ven, 1986, p. 592), the study of what motivates or enables individual to be innovative seems to be very critical. This is particular valuable in HC organizations. HC organizations typically do not have the luxury of a huge R&D department, and so must rely on the attitude and intentions of their employees to be innovative. Some theorists have suggested that organisational climate plays a critical role in determining workers' innovative work behaviour. This paper aims to improve the understanding of how organisational climate and its components affect individual innovative work behaviour, putting a specific focus on HC organisations. Design/methodology/approach - Based on the results of a literature review, the paper provides a theoretical model for investigating how organisational climate and its components affect employees' innovative work behaviour in HC organizations. The model provides a proper frame to study empirically the relationships between the components of organizational climate and the innovative work behaviour in HC context. In this regard, a survey, based on the model, is ongoing in a big italian public hospital. The units of analysis of the study are individuals working within the hospital departments (i.e. doctors, nurses and technicians, socio healthcare workers, administrative personnel). Data are collected mainly through a survey questionnaire and interviews with key informants. The survey questionnaire has been built on validated measures taken from literature. Especially we utilize the scale proposed from Wienand et al. (2007) and Janssen (2000, 2001) for measuring respectively organisational climate and employees' innovative behaviour. The analysis of the empirical data will be conducted by using appropriate statistical techniques. We expect that the capacity of HC workers to engage in innovative activities able to produce also incremental improvements in operations, is somehow affected by organisational climate. Originality/value - Recently a body of research that links organisational climate to quality processes and outcomes in HC is accumulating, but solid evidence of such linkages in relation to performance quality and, more specifically, to innovation is still lacking. The value of the paper lies in the analysis of a topic, such as the influence of organizational climate on employees' innovative work behavior, which is relevant but still under explored, as well as in the particular context of investigation, i.e. the HC service context. Practical implications - From a theoretical point of view, the research intends to shed more light on the complex link between organisational climate and its components and employees' innovative behaviour in HC context. While, from a practical point of view, the research seeks to identify some relevant individual and organizational factors to be managed in order to support and boost innovative work behaviour and to define valuable managerial implications supporting HC managers in the management of organisational climate and its components in order to improve innovative performance.