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efforts when trying to implement new services or work processes. No differences were seen between the two group of interviewees were seen. As one of our non-innovative respondents mentioned:
I do not believe that financial rewards are a trigger for idea generation. It does not improve work involvement. But after a new service has been introduced, my employees will see the
results of their efforts in their salary. If I did not do this, I would communicate that you cannot make a career by doing more than expected.
In contrast to the interviewees’ experience, some previous research shows that financial rewards may not be the best incentive to stimulate idea generation. Amabile (1988) claims that intrinsic motivation is more important to trigger non-routine behaviours than extrinsic rewards. Her research suggests one should avoid using money to “bribe” people to come up with innovative ideas. However, as intrinsic motivation is no prerequisite for effective implementation, rewards may well be used to trigger high-quality application behaviour of employees. In line with this, other research indicates that material rewards can be helpful, but they should be in line with other leader behaviours like providing support and recognition (Eisenberger and Cameron, 1996).
4.11 Providing resources
As soon as the decision to implement a promising idea is made, providing the necessary time and money seems to be essential. Some relevant quotes of interviewees include:
Being enthusiastic about an idea is one thing, but your employees will not believe you if you do not come up with the resources to develop it. And:
We have plenty of ideas, but at the moment we do not innovate at all. We have had a vacancy for over six months now, and we need all our time to keep up with our current activities.
Empirical support for a positive connection between providing resources and application behaviour is widely available. A frequently mentioned example of providing resources for employees is that of 3M, the multinational company where scientists and R&D professionals are encouraged to spend 15 per cent of their working hours on their own innovative projects (Brand, 1998). Ekvall and Ryhammer (1999) examined a variety of organizational variables that might influence innovation among scholars working at a Swedish university, and found that the availability of resources was most strongly related to their innovative results. Drawing upon interviews with R&D managers and employees, Judge et al. (1997) recommended that maintaining continuous “slack” resources helped to create an innovative culture. Finally, Nijhof et al. (2002) recommended exempting employees from their ordinary tasks in order to concentrate all their efforts on the development and implementation of their ideas.When employees were assigned to work on innovations only part-time they experienced working on a project as something additional to their daily activities, and this often resulted in longer development times, as their daily work remained the number one priority.
4.12 Monitoring
Compared to our innovative participants, the non-innovative interviewees appeared to have strong monitoring standards. One less innovative respondent thought this might be disadvantageous for idea generation:
We have adopted a low-cost strategy to be competitive. This implies that I frequently check whether my employees are spending too many hours on a single customer. This le