Workplace flexibility and innovation: The moderator effect of inter‐organizational cooperation

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the moderator effect of inter-organizational cooperation in the relationship between workplace flexibility and innovation performance. Postal survey to a sample of manufacturing and service firms. Hierarchical regression. It was found that innovation performan...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personnel review 2008-01, Vol.37 (6), p.647-665
Main Authors: Martínez‐Sánchez, Angel, José Vela‐Jiménez, María, Pérez‐Pérez, Manuela, de‐Luis‐Carnicer, Pilar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Competition
Competitive advantage
Cooperation
Employees
Employment
Flexibility
Hypotheses
Innovations
Knowledge
Labor market
Organizational behavior
Outsourcing
Product development
R&D
Research & development
Studies
Work environment
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The purpose of this paper is to analyse the moderator effect of inter-organizational cooperation in the relationship between workplace flexibility and innovation performance. Postal survey to a sample of manufacturing and service firms. Hierarchical regression. It was found that innovation performance is positively associated to internal functional flexibility, and negatively to external numerical flexibility and outsourcing. Inter-organizational cooperation moderates the relationships between functional flexibility, external numerical flexibility and outsourcing with innovation performance. The study's single country setting could limit the generalizability of the findings. Longitudinal as opposed to cross-sectional data are needed for studying the causal assumptions reported here. The results of this study suggest that high-cooperation firms may compensate the negative impact of external flexibility and perform better than low-cooperation firms. External knowledge and cooperation can be complementary. Managers should take into account that the benefits from external workplace (e.g. access to new knowledge) may be enhanced in the context of inter-organizational cooperation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that tests whether inter-organizational cooperation moderates the relationship between external numerical flexibility and innovation performance. The paper also investigates and applies internal and external flexibility in a single study which allows to compare how each of them impacts innovation performance. (PUBLICATION ABSTRACT)
ISSN:0048-3486
1758-6933
DOI:10.1108/00483480810906883