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Within-Individual Increases in Innovative Behavior and Creative,
Persuasion, and Change Self-Efficacy Over Time: A Social–Cognitive
Theory Perspective
Thomas W. H. Ng
The University of Hong Kong
Lorenzo Lucianetti
University of Chieti and Pescara
Studies of innovative behavior (the generation, dissemination, and implementation of new ideas) have
generally overlooked the agency perspective on this important type of performance behavior. Guided by
social– cognitive theory, we propose a moderated mediation relationship to explain why and how
employees become motivated to make things happen through their innovative endeavors. First, we
propose that within-individual increases in organizational trust and perceived respect by colleagues
promote within-individual increases in creative, persuasion, and change self-efficacy over time. Second,
we propose that within-individual increases in self-efficacy beliefs promote within-individual increases
in idea generation, dissemination, and implementation over time. Finally, we propose that psychological
collectivism (a between-individual variable) is a moderator, and that a higher level of psychological
collectivism weakens the positive relationship between within-individual increases in self-efficacy
beliefs and within-individual increases in innovative behavior. Repeated measures collected from 267
employees in Italy at 3 time points over an 8-month period generally support our proposed dynamic
moderated mediation relationship.
Keywords: innovative behavior, self-efficacy, social– cognitive theory, trust, respect
Organizations today strive for high degrees of not only produc-
tivity and service excellence but also innovation (Greve & Taylor,
2000;Han, Kim, & Srivastava, 1998). Researchers have thus
increasingly examined both the factors that promote idea genera-
tion and those that encourage idea dissemination and implemen-
tation (Axtell et al., 2000;Ng, Feldman, & Lam, 2010;Yuan &
Woodman, 2010). Innovative behavior has also become a core
component of employee performance evaluations (Gong, Huang,
& Farh, 2009;Welbourne, Johnson, & Erez, 1998) and is thus an
important construct that deserves more attention in its own right.
Despite the importance of innovative behavior, it is not neces-
sarily easy to promote it in the workplace. Employees may believe
that their ideas do not matter, will not be well received by others,
and/or cannot be successfully implemented in practice (Baer,
2012). To engage in innovative behavior, employees must possess
a strong sense of agency (a desire to intentionally make things
happen through their own actions; Bandura, 2001). Although re-
search on employee creativity has shown that stronger beliefs in
one’s ability to generate ideas are associated with greater creativity
(Gong et al., 2009;Tierney & Farmer, 2002), whether and how a
sense of agency affects different types of innovative behavior
remains largely unaddressed.
Social– cognitive theory is particularly relevant to this topic.
Grounded in the agentic perspective (Bandura, 2001), social–
cognitive theory suggests that individuals hold beliefs about their
ability to make things happen through their own actions (also
known as self-efficacy). Three tenets pertinent to self-efficacy
beliefs posited in this theory guide us in developing a theoretical
model to explain why (and by what mechanism) individuals be-
come increasingly motivated to engage in innovative behavior
over time. These three tenets have not been tested before in the
innovative behavior literature. Figure 1 depicts the proposed
model.
First, social– cognitive theory suggests that self-efficacy beliefs
determine behavioral intensity, particularly when the domains of
those beliefs and the type of behavior in question are in accordance
(Bandura, 2012). Although research has shown creative self-
efficacy to be related to idea generation (Gong et al., 2009;Tierney
& Farmer, 2002), innovative behavior may require more than
creative self-efficacy alone, as it involves idea dissemination and
implementation in addition to idea generation. For instance, Stern-
berg (2001) posits that creativity adds more value when the indi-
viduals who generate new ideas can also persuade others of the
utility of those ideas and convince others to implement them. We
thus propose that whereas growth in creative self-efficacy is a
precursor to increased idea generation, growth in persuasion and
change self-efficacy are precursors to increased idea dissemination
and implementation, respectively.
Second, social– cognitive theory posits that individuals who
experience increases in anxiety and fear are unlikely to experience
growth in self-efficacy because negative emotions signal to them
that they are vulnerable to poor performance (Bandura, 1977,
This article was published Online First June 8, 2015.
Thomas W. H. Ng, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University
of Hong Kong; Lorenzo Lucianetti, Department of Management and Busi-
ness Administration, University of Chieti and Pescara.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Thomas
W. H. Ng, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong
Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong. E-mail: tng@business.hku.hk
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Journal of Applied Psychology © 2015 American Psychological Association
2016, Vol. 101, No. 1, 14–34 0021-9010/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0000029
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