(Luận văn thạc sĩ) impact factors of sales employees’ creativity and innovative work behavior in banking industry evidence from vietnam

UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY
International School of Business
------------------------------

Pham Thi Khanh Ngoc

IMPACT FACTORS OF SALES EMPLOYEES’
CREATIVITY AND INNOVATIVE WORK
BEHAVIOR IN BANKING INDUSTRY:
EVIDENCE FROM VIETNAM
ID: 22140030

MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours)
SUPERVISOR: Dr. Pham Ngoc Thuy

Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2016


Acknowledgement
I would like to express my sincere acknowledge to my supervisor, Dr. Pham Ngoc Thuy
for her insightful guidelines, valuable recommendations, and feedbacks during my
research time. This research could not be possible without her evaluation in each stage
which I spent.

My next appreciation also sends to participants of the survey. They are colleagues,
friends in many banks in HCM city. They shared their time to assist me to answer the
questionnaire. All their contributions have helped me to have the successful study.

1

Abstract
This study focuses on the impact of empowering leadership and challenge work
environment on both sale employee’s creativity and innovative work behavior in
Vietnamese banking industry. An empirical test with a sample of 370 sale employees in
15 banks in Ho Chi Minh City by means of structural equation modeling indicates a
strong relationship between sale employees’ creativity and innovative work behavior.
Moreover, the findings indicate that both empowering leadership and a challenge work
environment are able to trigger sale employees’ creativity. Among this, sale employees’
creativity plays as a mediating variable in the relationship between empowering
leadership, a challenge work behavior, and the employees’ innovative work behavior. In
general, this study contributes some suggestions for bank managers in finding out the
appropriate methods to stimulate employees’ creativity and innovative work behavior in
order to aim at a strong and sustainable business performance.

Key words
Empowering leadership, challenge work environment, creativity, innovative work
behavior, banking industry, Vietnam.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
ABSTRACT
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF TABLES
1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................6
2. LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESIS ................................................................9
2.1 Sale employee’s creativity and innovative work behavior ........................................... 12

2.2 Empowering leadership and employee’s creativity ...................................................... 15
2.3 Challenge work environment and creativity .................................................................. 16
3. METHODOLOGY ............................................................................................................ 18
3.1 Procedure and Sample ..................................................................................................... 18
3.2 Measurement scale .......................................................................................................... 21
4. DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULT ................................................................................ 24
4.1 Measure validation .......................................................................................................... 24
4.2 Confirmatory Factory Analysis (CFA) .......................................................................... 27
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4.3 Structural result ............................................................................................................... 31
4.4 Hypothesis testing ........................................................................................................... 32
5. DISCUSSION .................................................................................................................... 34
5.1. Implications for managers ............................................................................................. 37
5.2. Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 39
5.3. Limitations and directions for future research.............................................................. 40
6. SUPPORT INFORMATION ............................................................................................ 40
6.1. Findings of preliminary research ................................................................................... 40
6.2. Questionnaire in English ................................................................................................ 44
6.3. Questionnaire in Vietnamese ......................................................................................... 47
REFERENCES

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Borrowed research model ..................................................................................... 11
Figure 2: Proposed research model ...................................................................................... 11
Figure 3: CFA result .............................................................................................................. 28

Figure 4: SEM result ............................................................................................................. 32

LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Descriptive Statistics of Sample ............................................................................ 21
Table 2: Measurement scale .................................................................................................. 23
Table 3: Means, standard deviations, and standardized CFA loadings of items ............... 30
Table 4: Structural paths in the model.................................................................................. 33
Table 5: Findings of preliminary research ........................................................................... 41
Table 6: Number of banks, and number of participated sale employees ........................... 43

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1. Introduction
According to Drucker (1989), any organization pretemits to innovate that will become the
ultimate reason for the decline and demise of existing organizations. Innovation is critical
for all organizational long-term prosperity, particularly in dynamic business environment
(Patterson, Kerrin & Gatto-Roissard, 2009). Lin and Liu (2012) concluded that
innovation is a crucial factor that brings the sustainable competitive advantages which
organizations can use to deal with such a rapid-change business environment. So, what
does the business start to innovate from? All innovations both arise from creative ideas of
employees – a vital component of organization creativity that is the confirmation from
many scholars (Woodman, Sawyer & Griffin, 1993).
Therefore, stimulating the creative ability of employees is one of the decisive factors
bring the succeed to an organization (Walton, 2003). Wong and Ladkin (2008) suggested
that managers in service organizations should encourage their employees to be more
creative. Once organization can enhance their employees’ creativity, it can contribute to
innovation and assist to the strong organizational survival and competitive advantage.
West (2002) stated that creativity can be regarded as an important component of
innovative work behavior. Although innovative work behavior is conducted by many

scholars all over the world, research for this topic is also limited in Vietnam.
Innovative work behavior in service jobs is the most important component to positively
contribute to service organizations’ performance; bank industry is regarded as an
example. It is accepted that procedural innovation contributes to economic development
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(Schumpeter, 1934). To reach to innovative work behavior in an organization, it is
necessary for organizations to encourage creativity among employees.
As the matter of fact, due to the specific characteristics of banking job, employees often
comply with available regulated procedures, principles of government and internal
banking without promoting their active ability and creativity in their job. Moreover, the
policy that stimulates the innovation among banks has not applied popularly and strictly
yet. Apparently, a majority employee also passive in working, just only do the delegated
tasks and make a change if any requests from supervisors. Consequently, employees have
not made breakthroughs in their daily job and this influence seriously to banks’
performances. Therefore, finding the factors that improve the innovative work behavior
of each employee to improve the quality of human resources is considered as a key
solution for the banking sector to meet the requirements of new development in recent
years. Subsequently, Edvardsson, Gustafsson, Johnson and Sanden (2000) recommended
that the managers should make an environment and practices that are able to trigger
creativity and innovation at the individual level. Among this, sales employees are
considered as a key labor force of banks in creating revenue.
The main decisive human resource of the banking industry is the sales person or credit
employees who deal with directly customers to bring the revenue to bank. However,
workforce meets the development of the banking sector in recent years, but objectively
recognized, quality of human resources is still low. The vast majority of bank employees
still have "gaps" in terms of skills (attitude to work, team work skills, proficiency in
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English, ability to communicate) and knowledge (the knowledge of the financial sector,
banks in general), as well as the flexibility in daily activities.
Therefore, this paper aims to indicate that the sale employee’s creativity is as the
vital precondition for innovative work behavior in banking service organizations. In order
to understand which factors can lead to sales employee’s creativity and innovative work
behavior in banking environment. This study will be conducted to examine two factors:
empowering leadership and challenge work environment.
This study concentrates on examining creativity and innovation from banking sales
employees’ perspective. This study is limited to and examines the impact of two factors
that are able to trigger sales employees’ creativity and innovation at the individual level,
namely:
(1) The impact of empowering leadership; and
(2) The impact of a challenge work environment.

In order to solve the research problem mentioned previously, this research has the
following objectives: examine whether empowering leadership and challenge work
environment are linked to sale employee’s creativity, which is turn is linked to sale
employees’ innovative work behavior in Vietnamese banking industry. The objective is
therefore to describe and explain the relationships between: empowering leadership and
challenge work environment; and sale employees’ creativity and innovative work
behavior in Vietnamese banking industry.

8


This paper was conducted in some banks in Ho Chi Minh City. The result of the research
will be able to use for Viet Nam in general and for further references since Ho Chi Minh
City is one of the biggest economic centers of Viet Nam. The interviewees will be sales
employees who work in credit department and contact directly with customers.

In general, this paper will assist human resource managers who are working in
banks in decision making, as well as in finding out the appropriate and effective activities
or strategies to maximize employee’s innovation. This paper has contributed to
evaluation system of innovative work behavior level in banking industry in Vietnam,
especially in dynamic city like Ho Chi Minh City. Moreover, the result of this research
would be reference source for researchers in banking human resource management.
2. Literature review and hypotheses
Although the literature on innovation in banking service is sparse, there seems to some
agreement among researchers that using and implementing theories of innovation
developed only on the basis of industry observations are inadequate for studying
innovations in service organizations in general and in banking industry in specifically
(Gadrey et al., 1994). Dejer (2004) employed the same concepts and tools that are used
for innovation in manufacturing organizations for service innovation. Coombs and Miles
(2000) suggest three ways of studying service innovation: “an assimilation approach”; “a
demarcation approach”; and “a synthesis approach”.
The first way treats services as being similar to manufacturing; the second one states that
service innovation is clearly various from innovation in manufacturing; and the third one
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suggests that service innovation brings to the forefront hitherto neglected elements that
are relevant for both manufacturing and service industries. The demarcation and
assimilation approaches are dominant in empirically based analyses of Dejer (2004). This
study has followed the demarcation approach in order to study the drivers of innovation.
Since the first reason for this choice is that banking industry is defined as a service sector,
which has a totally different foundation from manufacturing (Parasuraman et al., 1985);
the second reason relates to my focus on innovation at the individual level. Specifically, I
am interested in the drivers to service employees’ innovative behavior within a specific
work role, which refers to sale employees’ having a frontline job. Consequently, it is
reasonable to assume that the demarcation approach has the best potential for

contributing to our understanding of innovative behavior in sale employee in banking
service job. Following this line of reasoning, it is now to turn to the characteristic of sale
employee and the definition of the concept of innovative behavior.
According to Slatten, Svensson and Sværi (2011), the empowering leadership and
humorous work climate had the effect on service employees’ creativity and innovative
behavior in frontline service jobs, specifically in hospitality (see figure 1). It is quite
suitable for the study to examine the factor affecting to sale employee’s creativity and
innovative work behavior in the banking industry due to the similar characteristic of two
service industries. Thus, the study was carried out by borrowing the model of previous
study of Slatten, Svensson and Sværi (2011). The figure 1 shows the relationship among
research variables of the borrowed study.

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Figure 1. Borrowed research model
In order to examine this model in the banking industry, challenge work environment was
selected to replace the humorous work climate due to the target pressure of banking
industry. With the new variables, the proposed research model of this study is showed as
below (figure 2):

Figure 2. Proposed research model

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2.1. Sale employee’s creativity and innovative work behavior
Sales employee is a person who sells a company's products and services. For bank, they
sell the bank services such as savings, loan, and other products. As well as approaching
potential customers with the aim of winning new business; sales employees work to

maintain good relationships with existing clients, gaining repeat business wherever
possible.
It is accepted there are several examples for sale employee’s daily working: Search
customers (individuals, households and economic organizations ...) has needs: loan or use
the services of the bank (savings deposits, deposit paid and the amenities other useful);
Contact customers, based on customer needs and the ability to provide services, utilities,
banking and give advice to guide the customer to complete the necessary procedures
prescribed by the bank; Appraising customers borrowing requirements of reputation,
business capability, scale of operations, financial position, business performance, plans
business, the ability to repay principal and interest , collateral debt ...;Create credit
contracts, mortgage contracts and records related documents; Check using loans as
stipulated by the bank and monitor the repayment of principal and interest under the
contract.
Sale employee is considered as frontline service employees who always represent for
their company to contact with customers. They are critical to customers’ evaluations of
the service encounter. Since they meet lots of customers, they consequently create a new
and innovative way to approach a new kind of customer, a new kind of needs in order
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more completely to customize or personalize the service offered.
Creativity is the prerequisite for an organization’s innovation, effectiveness, and longterm survival and enables an organization’s adjustment to take advantage of emerging
opportunities (Majdar, Oldham and Pratt, 2002). Creativity at the individual employee
level is considered to be the first step toward innovation at the organizational level
(Amabile, 1988; Woodman et al., 1993). As creativity has been recognized as a key
contributor to organizations’ innovation, growth, and competitiveness, researchers in the
field of organizational behavior have devoted considerable effort to identifying personal
and contextual factors, as well as factors related to employees’ work environment, that
promote creativity.
West and Farr (1989) defined that innovative work behavior (hereafter “IWB”) is known

as the intentional creation, introduction, and application of new ideas within a work role,
group or organization, in order to benefit role performance, the group, or the
organization. Moreover, Far and Ford (1990) define innovative work behavior as an
individual’s behavior that try to reach the initiation and intentional introduction (within a
work role, group or organization) of new and useful ideas, processes, products or
procedures. In addition, Batteman and Grant (1999) stated that innovative work behavior
is the direct and intention behavior to change something in a way of creating different
conditions with the current situation at the time. In another definition, innovative work
behavior was defined as idea generation and application either as individual tasks, group
or organization by De Jong and Den Hartog (2007).
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Similarly, Janssen (2000) stated that innovative work behavior is regarded as employee
behavior which create, introduce, and apply new ideas intentionally within a work role, a
group, or an organization that are beneficial to performance. According to Grant (2000),
innovative work behavior is considered as a very crucial factor for the survival of an
organization due to its benefit to the organization.
Whereas IWB differs from employee creativity which is defined as the production of
new and useful ideas concerning products, services, processes and procedures (Amabile,
1988) due to the implementation of ideas of IWB, creativity is confirmed as a crucial
factor related to innovation (Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby and Herron, 1996). Creative
ideas become the very first step of innovation process when Van de Ven (1986) identified
that creativity is the foundation of innovation ideas.
Consequently, the perception of creativity and innovation are apparently related. Due to
the characteristic of banking work role, employees are often passive to do follow by the
available procedures. They lack of creativity when dealing with customers’ problems.
Therefore, it is reasonable when this study assume that creativity will helps banking
employees to be more innovation in his/ her work behavior when offering a banking
service to customer. This study supposes a direct link between employees’ creativity and

their innovative work behavior in such a banking work environment. Accordingly, it is
proposed:
H1: Employee’s creativity is positively related to sales employee’s innovative work
behavior in banking industry.
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2.2. Empowering leadership and employee’s creativity
Although there have not many previous researches for the testing of relationship between
empowerment and employees’ creativity, especially in sales banking services,
empowering leadership has been mentioned as a leadership style able to influence
employees’ creativity. According to Zhang and Bartol (2010), empowering leadership is
considered as a “leadership approach with considerable promise of influencing employee
creativity” (p.109).
Empowering allows employees the responsibility and authority needed to act quickly
without a long process of command (Hart, James, & Sasser, 1990; Lewis & Gabrielsen,
1998). With the empowerment, employees could control over many situations of the
service delivery (Hartline & Ferrell, 1996). Moreover, they can learn the connection
between their actions and customer value when they response to dissatisfied customers
(Dover, 1999). As the matter of fact, there is substantial evidence that empowerment has
a significant influence on job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Babakus,
Yavas, Karatepe & Avci, 2003). Barbakus et al. (2003) stated that empowerment is
considered as an essential factor related to service excellence. Although empowerment
has been linked to service excellence, there seems to be not many researches to test the
relationship between empowering leadership and creativity. Forrester (2000) defined
when managers give the freedom and ability to his or her employees to make independent
decisions and commitments, this called empowering leadership. This definition clearly
emphasized employee self- determination or decision-making autonomy, which the
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service employee should have.
This idea also is supported in the creativity’s literature, which has emphasized the
perception of autonomy and participation in decision-making as crucial factors for
creative objectives among employees (Amabile, Schatzel, Moneta & Kramer, 2004). In
this study, empowering leadership is assumed to positively link with employees’
creativity. Therefore, the first hypothesis is proposed:
H2. Empowering leadership is positively related to sales employees’ creativity in banking
industry.
2.3. Challenge work environment and creativity
It is accepted that work environment has been emphasized as a crucial factor for any
organizations (Schneider, 1980). The working environment is a part of the overall system
which determines whether work proceeds properly. Many researchers confirmed that
environment has also been assessed to enhance operations and performance and has had a
significant effect on the financial performance of any organization (Ekvall &
Rykhammer, 1998; Schuster, Dunning, Morden, Hagan, Baker & McKay, 1997). Sim and
Keon (1997) showed that work environment has been one of important factors in the
retention of employees. Employees will be more comfortable, will perform better, and
will stay on the job longer, the organizations will be more effective when characteristics
of the individual and the work environment are compatible (Kristof, 1996; Ostroff &
Rothausen, 1997).
Ekvall (1996) defined that challenge work environment has been one of ten internal
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conditions for creative behavior and performance. Challenge was described as the degree
to which members of the organization are involved in its daily operations and long term
goals. In a high challenge work environment, people are intrinsically motivated to make
contributions, find joy and meaningfulness in their work, and invest much energy in
their daily working. After empirically testing ten environment dimensions and their

linkages with product innovation between groups of ten organizations, Ekvall (1996)
revealed that higher challenge work environment were significantly more innovative than
those that reported lower challenge work environment. In this study I focus on banking
employees’ experiences and perceptions of a challenge work environment in their
organization. Specifically, challenge work environment focuses on two aspects. The first
relates to whether one use challenge to create their effort to create the new things in their
job. The second aspect relates to whether one’s place of work is characterized by
challenge. It is assumed that these two aspects reflect a person’s overall perception of
their environment in relation to challenge work environment. Ekvall (1996) supported a
positive relationship between challenge work environment and creativity when he
suggests that a challenge work environment is strongly encourages people to engage in
creative thinking, which leads to innovations. Consequently, on the basis of this
discussion, I propose a hypothesis:
H3. A challenge work environment is positively related to sales employees’ creativity in
banking industry.

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3. Methodology
3.1. Procedure and sample
Ho Chi Minh City was considered as a survey place because it is the most populous city
in Vietnam with the huge number of dynamic labor workforce gathered in this city to
work. Therefore, Ho Chi Minh City was the most suitable place for us to carry out this
research. This study consisted of two phases, a pilot study and a main survey, were
undertaken to collect data for testing the proposed model. Participants were sales
employees from many bank’s representative such as: Vietinbank, Vietcombank, BIDV,
Agribank, ANZ Bank, HSBC, Nam A Bank, Ocean Bank, Sacombank, ACB, OCB,
Citibank, Eximbank, Techcombank, VIB ….
At the beginning, when approaching a respondent for interview, the interviewer asked the

respondent to list three innovative work behaviors that he or she had done during his or
her daily working activity. After that, in order to easier answer the questionnaire, the
interviewer chose the most three innovative work behaviors for respondents to randomly
selected to answer the question. These are innovative work behaviors in: customer
services; bank policy procedures: documents, financial analysis, and problem solving;
finding new and potential customers; and others such as arrange working place, store
documents, folders and reports scientifically and systematically.
The pilot study was implemented just only preliminary survey. The objective of
this preliminary survey aimed to make sure that they are suitable for the Vietnamese
context. Therefore, in the preliminary phase, in-depth interviews will be carried out with
a sample of 15 sale employees during the first week in June 2016. They answered directly
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to the interviewer using the open questions like expectation in their job, what they do for
a better job. Moreover, I also showed the planned questionnaire to check whether all the
participants have the clear understanding on what we prepare to ask in the main
questionnaire later.
Hachter (1994) pointed out the minimum sample size is equal or larger 5 time of
variables (n>5k). This study has totally 5 constructs with 26 variables so the minimum
sample size is: n= 26 x 5 = 130.
The main survey was also undertaken with qualitative method by sending
questionnaire form in Google Docs with a convenience sample of 370 sale employees.
The survey was sent via Google Docs due to its advantages over the other method such as
low costs, convenient for both the participants and the interviewers, and easy to access to
the sample. A total number of 392 questionnaires were delivered to sale employees in 15
banks in Ho Chi Minh City and collect 370 samples after deleting 22 incomplete
responses.
In 370 participants, there had 232 (62.7%) sales employees and 138 (37.3%)
relationship managers in surveyed banks. Among this, they indicated that customers

services is the stage which they had the most innovative work behavior with 140 people
(accounted for 37.8%); 130 (35.1%) had the innovation in bank policy procedures such
as: documents, financial analysis, and problem solving; 88 (23.8%) had the innovation in
finding new and potential customers; and 12 (3.2%) for others.
There was a slight difference between female and male sale employees with 178
(48.1%) female sale employees and 192 (51.9%) male sale employees. Due to the
19


characteristics of the credit department in bank, it is easy to understand when the number
of male was greater than the number of female. There were two age groups in this survey:
181 (49%) sale employees who were from 22 to 30; and 189(51%) sale employees with
the age from 31 to over 35.
Additionally, the survey result revealed that 29 (7.8%) sale employees having
college; 177 (47.8%) sale employees having bachelor degree, and 164 (44.3%) having
master degree. This showed that the education level more and more develop.
Finally, for the experience in their working bank, there were 182 (49.2%)
respondents having 1 to less than 3 year working in banking industry, 188 (50.8%)
respondents having from 3 to over 5 years in banks.
The satisfied questionnaires, after screening, were coded and input the raw data in
SPSS version 20. Cronbach’s Alpha and Exploratory factor Analysis would evaluate the
reliability and validity of measurement scales. Then, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)
was performed to identify whether the measurement variables reliably reflected the
hypothesized latent variables. A structural equation modeling (SEM) with latent variables
via AMOS 20 was tested to determine the adequacy of the constructs of the model and
test the hypotheses.

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Table 1. Descriptive Statistics of Sample
Item

Frequency

Percent

Gender

Item

Frequency

Percent

Work experience

Male

192

51.9

1 - < 3 year

182

49.2

Female

178

48.1

3 - > 5 year

188

50.8

Total

370

100%

Total

370

100%

Age

Education level

22 – 30

181

49

College

29

7.8

31 – 35

189

51

Bachelor

177

47.8

Total

370

100%

Master

164

44.3

Total

370

100%

3.2. Measurement scales
There were four constructs were examined in this study: empowering leadership,
challenge work environment, sale employees’ creativity, and innovative work behavior.
The structured questionnaire was employed with most of the items having been
developed from different sources in previous studies. Moreover, the questionnaire was
pre-test. On the basis of thorough comments from professor, friends, co-workers, and
direct participants in the pre-test, I reworked a few questions for the sake of improving
validity and clarity. The collected data from pre-test was not used in the subsequent
analysis. The source of each construct and their items were as follows:
Empowering leadership was measured by five items rated by sale employees, borrowed
from Babakus et al. (2003).
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Challenge work environment was chosen from ten climate items that affect creativity in
organizations of study of Isaksen, Lauer and Ekvall (1999). The items for this construct
were developed specifically for Vietnamese context based on the results of the
preliminary pilot study. Results from the preliminary pilot study indicate that challenge
makes sale employees want to have some innovative things to make their job smoothly.
For example, a respondent expressed her own opinion about the challenge as follows: “I
feel excited with the challenge which the bank creates; I want to win all challenge in my

job”. So that, the four following items were used: “Challenge is characteristic of banking
environment”, “I use challenge as a part of my effort to create new things in my working
place”, “I see that the working environment in my bank always changes”, and “I am
always required to update knowledge in my bank”.
Creativity was measured by seven items scale which adopted and modified from Zhou
and George (2001).
Finally, innovative work behavior was measured by ten items using items from Janssen
(2000), it showed how often employees perform those innovative work behaviors in their
office.
All items were seven-point Likert- type scale ranging with 1 = strongly disagree and 7 =
strongly agree. The questionnaire formed originally in English. Later, it was translated
into Vietnamese to suit for all units of observations. After that, back translation was
undertaken to make sure the equivalence of meanings. The questionnaire was consisted
of three parts: individual information, main questions, and demographic information.
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Table 2. Measurement scales
Variables
Empowering
leadership

Challenge
work
environment

Creativity

Innovative
work

behavior

Code
Item
EMPOW1 I am empowered to solve problem customer
problems.
EMPOW2 I am encouraged to handle customer problems by
myself.
EMPOW3 I do not have to get management’s approval before
I handle customer problems.
EMPOW4 I am allowed to do almost anything to solve
customer problems.
EMPOW5 I have control over how I solve customer
problems.
Challenge is characteristic of banking
CHAL6
environment.
I use challenge as a part of my motivation to create
CHAL7
new things in my working place.
I see the working environment in bank X always
CHAL8
change.
My work at bank X is required to update the
CHAL9
knowledge.
CREAT10 I often suggest new ways to achieve goals or
objectives.
CREAT11 I often come up with new and practical ideas to
improve performance.

CREAT12 I often suggest new ways to increase quality.
CREAT13 I often promote and champion ideas to others.
CREAT14 I often develop adequate plans and schedules for
the implementation of new ideas.
CREAT15 I often come up with creative solutions to
problems.
CREAT16 I often suggest new ways of performing work
tasks.
INNOV17 I often look for opportunities to improve things.
INNOV18 I often wonder how things can be improved.
INNOV19 I often find new approaches to execute tasks.
INNOV20 I often mobilize support for innovative ideas.
INNOV21 I am important organizational members
enthusiastic for innovative ideas.
INNOV22 I often attempt to convince people to support an
innovative idea.
INNOV23 I often transform innovative ideas into useful
23

Reference
Babakus,
Yavas,
Karatepe
and Avci
(2003)

Isaksen,
Lauer and
Ekvall
(1999)

Zhou and
George
(2001)

Janssen
(2000)


applications.
INNOV24
INNOV25
INNOV26

I often systematically introduce innovative ideas
into work practices.
I often contribute to the implementation of new
ideas.
I often put effort in the development of new things.

4. Data analysis and results
4.1. Measure validation
After data collection was completed, the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS)
and SPSS AMOS 20.0 were used to analyze. Firstly, the reliability tests Cronbach’s
Alpha and EFA (exploratory factor analysis) were applied to the data of the main survey
(n=370) in order to conduct a preliminary test of the validity and reliability of the scales
to measure the construct. Secondly, CFA (Confirmatory factor analysis) was conducted.
Finally, SEM (structural equation modeling) is applied to test the relations between
latent, observed variables and hypotheses.
Cronbach’s Alpha is the most common tool to measure the internal consistency

reliability. This alpha is calculated with an assumption that the scale is unidimentional.
That is the reason why factor analysis technique is employed to check the
unidimensionality of the scale.
Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient normally ranges between 0 and 1. The closer
alpha coefficient is to 1.0 the greater the internal consistency of the items in the scale.
The size of alpha is determined by both the number of items in the scale and the
mean inter-item correlations. It is accepted by provide the following rules: α > .9
(Excellent); α > .8 (Good); α > .7 (Acceptable); α > .6 (Questionable); α > .5(Poor); α <
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