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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of high-involvement human resource management (HRM) practices on innovation capabilities via the mediating role of knowledge sharing (KS) behaviors. This paper also investigates the potential moderating role of market turbulence in fostering the influence of KS behaviors on two forms of innovation capability, namely exploitative and exploratory innovation.

Analysis of moment structures and structural equation modeling are applied to examine the correlation among the latent constructs based on the survey data collected from 125 manufacturing and service firms.

The findings of this study support the mediating role of KS behaviors in the relationship between high-involvement HRM practices and aspects of innovation capability. It highlights the important role of market turbulence in strengthening the influence of KS on exploitative and exploratory innovation.

Future research should investigate the impact of high-involvement HRM practices on innovation capability under the moderating effects of organizational variables, such as perceived organizational support, to bring better understanding on a new mechanism to pursuit innovation.

The paper significantly contributes to increasing knowledge and insights into the correlation between high-involvement HRM practices and specific forms of innovation. The understanding on the mediating role of KS behaviors and the moderating role of market turbulence contribute to advancing the body of knowledge of HRM and innovation theory.

Given the important role of knowledge sharing (KS) processes for organizational innovation, the purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating roles of tacit and explicit KS in bridging the relationship between high-involvement human resource management (HRM) practices and specific aspects of innovation capability, namely, product and process innovation.

Analysis of moment structures and structural equation modeling are applied to examine the correlation among the constructs based on the survey data collected from 111 manufacturing and service firms.

The empirical findings reveal that KS processes positively mediate the relationship between high-involvement HRM practices and innovation capability. It highlights the important role of explicit KS in fostering aspects of innovation capability compared to the effects of tacit KS on aspect of innovation capability.

Vietnamese firms should pay much attention to high-involvement HRM practices to improve their innovation capabilities. In addition, fostering the willingness of employees for sharing tacit knowledge (e.g. experiences, uncommon understandings and insights) and explicit knowledge (e.g. formal information, official documents and reports and procedures and policies) is one of the most optimal solutions for firms to pursuit product and process innovation capability.

This paper significantly contributes to increasing knowledge and insights on the correlation between high-involvement HRM practices and specific forms of innovation. The understanding on mediating role of KS processes contributes to advancing the body of knowledge of HRM practices and innovation theory.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the experience of call centre employees who have been involved in high-involvement innovation (HII) activities to understand what frontline and managerial employees think of these involvement activities.

A qualitative case study approach is utilised, drawing on evidence from seven UK call centres. Various sources of data are examined, i.e. interviews, observation, call listening and documentary.

From the analysis of the testimonies, it is found that job design, the mechanisms and practices as well as other people’s perceptions of involvement influence the experience of frontline and managerial employees. The findings highlight that HII has the potential to intensify jobs (both frontline and managerial employees) when the quantity of ideas submitted becomes a component of the employee performance appraisal system.

This research has shown that the heightened targets used in many of the cases have reduced the ability of employees to be involved in any innovation activities. What is not clear from the findings is that if performance measures can be used in a more participative way with employees so that they can have less time pressure allowing them to become more involved in innovation activities. Thus, an interesting direction for future research would be to consider the effects of performance measurement systems in the role they play in facilitating HII activities.

The findings show that HII has the potential to enrich frontline employees’ jobs, making them feel more valued and giving them some variety and challenge in their job. Therefore, practitioners should approach employee involvement in the innovation process as something potentially fruitful and not just wasted time away from the phones.

This research is important as it explores what effects these involvement initiatives have on the employees and managers involved in them. This is valuable since there is no real consensus across human resource management, labour process and critical management fields resulting in a limited conceptualisation of the relationship between management practices, employee experiences and the outcomes. This research makes a contribution through the elaboration of current theory to understand the complexities and subtleties that exist between the high involvement management practices and the experience of workers and their managers.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

This paper studies the relationship between HR practices and firm performance. In that purpose, a list of high‐involvement practices – that is to say aiming to develop employees’ organizational commitment and involvement at work – is proposed. A survey among 180 French HR managers hightlights a significant link between most HR practices and firm performance. Moreover, the results show that these practices, when they are combined into bundles, have a stronger impact on performance than when they are studied individually.

This paper aims to examine how high involvement HRM (HIHRM), technology adaptation and innovativeness influence employees to respond to technology innovation performance – that is, radical innovation performance and incremental innovation performance – in distinct ways.

The purposive judgmental sample technique is used to assess the perceptions of 545 IT employees in Bangladesh's ready-made garment (RMG) industry. The partial least square-structural equation modeling (SEM-PLS) method is applied to analyze and interpret the data.

Findings of the analysis show that HIHRM, technology adaptation and innovativeness influence employees to exhibit technology innovation performance. Furthermore, both technology adaptation and innovativeness show the significant mediating effects between HIHRM and technology innovation performance.

First, this study’s findings contribute to HIHRM and technology innovation performance within the context of the resource-based theory. Second, the RMG organizations would acknowledge the role of HIHRM on employee technology adaptability and innovation capability in this regard. A future study might point to the models' ability to create the best work environments, which can help organizations to boost employee productivity through adaptation and innovation.

The study would offer a distinctive perspective on higher-order HIHRM and how they affect IT employees in RMG organizations in Bangladesh that could be approached in other labor-intensive and developing nations. This study also expands the research on technology adaptation and innovativeness by exploring the mediating roles between HIHRM and employee technology innovation performance in the organization.

This paper aims to discuss the interview held with Professor John Bessant conducted by Professor Peter Totterdill. John Bessant has been active in research, teaching and consultancy in technology and innovation management for over 25 years. He currently holds the Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Exeter University where he is also Research Director.

This wide-ranging and insightful interview looks at the challenges of implementing workplace innovation and the realities involved in the process. It covers questions concerning the importance of innovation to businesses coming out of recession and the relationship between employee involvement and innovation.

Professor Bessant also discusses the challenge of releasing individual potential and how to harness random creativity. He looks at the “starter conditions” for workplace innovation as well as the factors that mitigate against sustaining it.

Key to sustaining workplace innovation, he argues, are a number of elements including momentum, self-belief and confidence, appropriate resource, leadership and empowerment. In addition, the implementation of workplace innovation does not occur as one big hit but a series of small steps which evolve and develop.

New technology via intranets and social media also help to mobilise a lot more participation. Technology now provides the potential to reach every employee and their involvement can be instantaneous. This can create a notion of shared creativity, the Facebook process of “good idea, I like that, why don’t you try that?”

This article aims to demonstrate that trade unions possess unique knowledge of how organisations really work and that they are repositories of experience embracing many different situations and stretching over many years. Closing the gap between best practice and common practice needs knowledgeable advocates to actively demonstrate what workplace innovation is and how it benefits organisations and individuals.

This article demonstrates that trade unions possess unique knowledge of how organisations really work and that they are repositories of experience embracing many different situations and stretching over many years. Yet, this experience and understanding is often an underused resource in workplaces.

At the frontline, union representatives can release their members’ tacit knowledge and ideas for improvement and innovation. At strategic level, unions can deliver robust advice and consultancy, securing trust from employees and employers alike. Actively involving unions in dialogue about challenges and opportunities is the key to unlocking this potential.

The paper draws upon examples of collaborative working and the role of unions from the USA, Ireland and Norway, while a more detailed analysis of the “Danish Experience” demonstrates how Ideas, high levels of knowledge and strong relationships between unions and employers able to handle both shared and conflicting interests, impacts on trade unions ability to “stimulate, resource and sustain workplace innovation”.

The paper concludes with a call to action showing how a mass movement of workplace innovation can be achieved through shared learning case studies and resources and from the creation of the European Workplace Innovation Network Knowledge Bank to help people to share their knowledge and experience.

To guarantee alignment between ongoing activities and organizational goals, innovation management theory emphasizes management control and explicit innovation strategies as prerequisites for innovation performance. However, the theory on open services innovation emphasizes individual autonomy and incentives to foster open innovations. The aim of this paper is to explore this inconsistency.

An explorative research design involving 25 semi-structured interviews in five large scale-intensive service firms is explored. Scale-intensive service firms are strategically sampled for this study since these firms experience tension between open service innovation characteristics and efforts to standardize.

The authors show how individual autonomy facilitates the internal and external networking required in open innovations. However, individualized incentives do not suffice to motivate, mobilize and direct the collaboration and collective effort needed to ensure successful implementation of open innovation processes. Innovation performance is a collective effort, and the findings suggest that firms' business strategy works as a collective incentive system.

The findings imply that firms should not rely on individualized incentives alone to implement open innovation processes successfully. The implementation of more collectively oriented incentives is also necessary to motivate the collective effort required to succeed with open innovation.

The study extends previous work and shows how innovation practices are collective efforts that also involve the mobilization of external resources. The incentives observed have an effect on individual behaviour, while performance measures, to a larger degree, cater to the collective level. The authors present three propositions for further empirical investigation.