Psychosocial model behind innovation: psychological safety, team climate, and social capital

Abstract

To stay competitive, enterprises must innovate continuously (Li & Zheng, 2014), especially in the fast-growing industries. An innovative organizational culture is both flexible and has an internal atmosphere that can speed up information exchange and respond to new opportunities quickly (Urbancova, 2013). Enterprises need an innovation-friendly atmosphere that inspires creativity and promotes modernization (Li & Zheng, 2014; Tsai, Horng, Liu, & Hu, 2015). Also, they should be aware of how to build an innovative corporate culture and what factors affect a trustworthy and creative atmosphere. One of the most relevant sources of innovation is the cooperation between coworkers (Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005), through which their knowledge, expertise and ideas are accumulating to accomplish organizational goals (Edmondson and Lei, 2014). Besides cooperativity and team climate, leadership style seems to have a most critical influence on corporate innovation (Li & Zheng, 2014; Noruzy, Dalfard, Azhdari, Nazari-Shirkouhi, & Rezazadeh, 2013) both in private and public sectors. Our research is aimed to examine the interrelationship between perceived leadership style and team innovation potential: workplace social capital, team climate and psychological safety. We examined employees (N=354) from different Hungarian companies with an anonymous online questionnaire, measuring demographic variables, leadership-style (charismatic, ethical, transformational, authentic and transactionalist), workplace social capital (COPSOQ II, Kristensen et al., 2005; Berthelsen et al., 2016), psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999) and innovative actions of the company. Results demonstrate a psychosocial model behind innovation. Based on our analyses, transformational and authentic leadership styles have a significant impact on the presence of