INNOVATIVE ESTEEM: ANTECEDENTS AND RELATIONSHIP WITH JOB PERFORMANCE

This study aims to present and validate a new psychological construct, i.e. innovativenessbased self-esteem or shortly “innovative esteem” which reflects that innovative individuals evaluate their innovative capabilities to determine their significance, successfulness, and worthiness in organizations. Innovative esteem reflects attributes and capacities manifested by individual’s innovativeness specific feelings and evaluations about self. Standard procedures were followed to test construct and predictive validity for the new construct. Testing 546 paired responses from subjects working in hi-tech and R&D sectors, this study empirically identified that personal innovativeness, organization-based self-esteem, learning goal orientation, and job autonomy significantly contribute to innovative esteem in organizational setting. Test of theory of interaction revealed that learning goal orientation and job autonomy interact with each other to determine innovative esteem. In addition, this research correlated innovative esteem with employee job performance by considering it as independent index. Innovative esteem is found to be significantly and positively correlated to employee job performance. The study further applied regression analysis to strengthen the finding, and found that innovative esteem significantly predicted employee job performance in time lagged setting. To establish evidence of stability of innovative esteem over time, data were collected again after one year. The test-retest reliability correlation provided the evidence of stability of innovative esteem over time. Present study proposed that innovative works can best be performed by employees high in innovative esteem which could be further confirmed empirically. It is suggested that organizations can outperform if managers consider innovative esteem of employees along with other dispositional factors. It is further suggested that significance of innovative esteem should be explored further in personality psychology and organizational behaviour.