تراکم نیروی کار خلاق، سستی سازمانی و عملکرد نوآورانه

This study examines the effects of creative workforce density and organizational slack on innovation performance. This article suggests an inverse U-shaped relationship between creative workforce density and innovation performance and proposes two governing forces relating to this relationship. Moreover, this study suggests that different slacks vary in affecting innovation. When adding absorbed and unabsorbed slacks as moderators, the relationship between creative workforce density and innovation performance becomes strengthened or attenuated respectively. Comprehensive secondary data on 305 Taiwanese firms in IT sector support the prediction. This article also discusses the managerial implications and highlights future research directions.

An organization's ability to continuously generate innovation is essential to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in today's highly competitive business environment (Montes et al., 2004 and Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005). The foundation of the innovation is creative ideas and individuals in the firms are those who discuss, generate, promote, and ultimately realize ideas (Scott and Bruce, 1994 and Van de Ven, 1986). Firms that effectively leverage the pool of creative energy in house can elevate the innovative capabilities well beyond the incremental and mundane (Mascitelli, 2000). Accordingly, establishing a creative workforce to effectively tap the individual ideas toward creative results is a challenge for firms. Owning to the increasing importance of creative workforce, scholars have paid attentions to exploring its impact on innovation. Prior studies in the group literature progress to investigate factors relating to workforce, such as diversity, leadership, structure, and climate that can affect innovation (e.g., Woodman et al., 1993, Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, Ofori-Dankwa and Julian, 2002, Paulus, 2000, King and Anderson, 1990 and Janssen et al., 2004). However, few scholars explore the size effect of the creative workforce on innovation performance. This study primarily focuses on this issue and concerns the following questions: Is the performance-enhancing effect of the creative workforce linear? What is the appropriate level of the creative workforce for maximizing firm's innovation outcomes? Prior studies provide some clues about the relationship between the size of creative workforce and innovation. Some scholars propose the positive benefits of larger size because of frequent dialogue and knowledge sharing (e.g., Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, Paulus, 2000, Egan, 2005 and Mascitelli, 2000) while others suggest the negative impact of group size due to conflicts and coordination problems (e.g., Harrison et al., 1998, Jehn et al., 1999 and Shapiro, 2000). These arguments imply that the size of creative people has bright and dark side effects on innovation and accordingly the relationship may be non-linear. Therefore, in present study, we suggest that these two forces would govern the relationship between creative workforce and innovation and would provide empirical evidences to support the prediction. In addition, some researchers recognize the importance of slack resources for innovation and pay attentions to link the relationship between slack resources and innovation (e.g., Damanpour, 1991, Nohria and Gulati, 1996, Judge et al., 1997 and Greve, 2003). In the process of innovation, resources act as inducements to experiment, take risks, and make proactive strategic choices. Organizational slack was recognized as a critical facilitator to promote experimentation by allowing uncertainty to be absorbed (Cyert and March, 1963, Nohria and Gulati, 1996 and Keegan and Turner, 2002). In viewing innovation as output of a complex social system in which creative individuals interact with each other, some prior studies point out the possible contextual role of slack resources (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990, Damanpour, 1991, Woodman et al., 1993 and Keegan and Turner, 2002). However, few prior studies try to examine how organizational slack moderate the firm's innovation process. Moreover, scholars often treat organizational slack uniformly from a theoretical standpoint (e.g., Nohria and Gulati, 1996), though operate organizational slack as a multi-component concept (e.g., Bourgeois, 1981, Singh, 1986, Bromiley, 1991, Geiger and Cashen, 2002 and Tan and Peng, 2003). Some research has suggested that different types of slack may have different effects on innovation (e.g., Geiger and Cashen, 2002 and Tan and Peng, 2003). Distinguishing how different slacks influence the innovative activities is necessary and valuable (Nohria and Gulati, 1996). It is helpful to use a contingency perspective to specify the natures of different slacks when discussing their impacts on organizational outcomes (Cheng and Kesner, 1997 and Tan and Peng, 2003). Therefore, this study focuses on investigating the effects of creative workforce and different slacks, absorbed and unabsorbed, on innovation outcome. The rest of the article is set out as follows. The next section considers the previous literature and sets out the hypotheses of this study. Following that is the methodology for the study. Then, the article presents the results of the empirical study in achieving the goals as set out above. In the last section, the article discusses the managerial implications and highlights future research directions.

This study examines the effects of creative workforce density and organizational slack on innovation performance. The results show support for the curvilinear relationship between creative workforce density and innovation performance. These findings indicate that an optimal level of creativity workforce density exists. Before reaching the optimal level, the increase of creative workforce density results in an increase in innovation performance. However, when exceeding the optimal level, innovation performance goes down as the creative workforce density increases. By integrating the arguments of prior related studies about the positive benefits (e.g., Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, Walsh, 1995 and Audia and Goncalo, 2007) and the negative impacts (e.g., Harrison et al., 1998, Jehn et al., 1999 and Shapiro, 2000) of the workforce size, this study proposes two underlying forces to explain this relationship. The positive force is the formation of the collective knowledge structure providing the benefits of knowledge sharing and learning while the negative force is the interaction costs associated with conflicts and coordination problems. Taken together, these arguments suggest that the proper way to think about the relationship between creative workforce and innovation is to view the relationship as having an inverse U-shape. Thus, the following question to ask is what amount of creative workforce is optimal for each firm? Answering the question would depend on a number of factors and organizational slack is one such important factor. This study argues that different slack resources would vary in influencing innovation and hypothesizes the arguments as absorbed slack positively while unabsorbed slack negatively moderate the effect of creative workforce density on innovation outcome. The empirical evidences provide strong support for the hypothesized contingent effects. These results imply that absorbed slack works as an internal maintenance mechanism that firms can reallocate for workforce coordination and conflict resolution but unabsorbed slack works as a facilitator of risky strategic behavior that firms should use carefully when efficiency rules. The empirical evidences in this research echo prior studies' calls (e.g., Cheng and Kesner, 1997 and Tan and Peng, 2003) by providing a contingency perspective to specify the different impact of organizational slacks on innovation performance. The findings of this study contribute to the theoretical development of a conceptual model for explaining the relationships among creative workforce density, organizational slack, and innovation performance. Theoretically, this study proposes two underlying forces to hypothesize the inverse U-shaped effect of creative workforce density on innovation outcome. This study introduces the new concept of creative workforce density as a strategic arrangement to stimulate innovation outcome. Accordingly, this study provides some significant implications for the growing body of research on human side of innovation. In addition, this study identifies the different moderating role of organizational slacks on the innovation. Following the suggestions of previous research, this study hypothesizes that absorbed and unabsorbed slacks would play different role in affecting the innovation. By specifying the differences between slacks, this study provides a better understanding on how firms can efficiently and effectively manage their resources in the innovation process. The second contribution of this study is the derivation of empirical support for the model's prediction using data from actual cases. This study contributes to the literature by empirically examining the relationships among creative workforce density, organizational slack, and innovation performance. The results prove that the use of creative workforce would explain the firm's innovation performance in a curvilinear way; however, when absorbed and unabsorbed slacks are added as a moderator, the curvilinear relationship would become stronger and weaker respectively. Thus, this study demonstrates that different slacks vary in affecting innovation. The findings of this study fill the gap in the literature that is lack of empirically examining the effects of creative workforce and organizational slack on innovation performance. The findings of this study should be interpreted with caution in light of the limitations. First, since the sample contains only IT sector, the findings may not generalize to other sectors. Secondly, this study introduces only slack resources as the moderator of creative workforce density-innovation performance relationship. Other factors such as organizational structure and innovation strategy may also have impact on the relationship. Future research can explore how these factors contingently contribute to improve or deprave the impact of creative workforce on innovation outcome. Thirdly, the measurement of innovation performance in this study is efficiency-oriented. When concerning innovation quality, the effects of creative workforce and organizational slack may become quite different. Future studies can work on comparing the impact of organizational slack on both the quality and quantity of innovation. To conclude, creative workforce and organizational slack are valuable resources for firms to utilize for superior innovation and sustainable competitive advantages. The viewpoints in this study highlight the optimal use of creative workforce and the crucial importance of the moderating role of organizational slack when examining the relationship between creative workforce and innovation performance.