Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-1-2015
Abstract
The relentless challenge to innovate is the DNA of high-technology firms, and continues to capture attention of scholars and practitioners alike. High-technology firms grow faster on intellectual capital assets with shorter life expectancy; they must pivot in response to external forces more quickly. The challenge for R&D leaders is to ensure that R&D groups provide new opportunities for growth by effective transfer of technology ideation to commercial products. Leaders in these dynamic environments operate in microfoundations of organizational routines and processes within an organization that motivate the sensing, seizing, and executing dynamic capabilities. R&D leaders within the firm are forced to make individual managerial judgments in the presence of uncertainty generating ambidexterity and creating conflicts in executing rule-based routines. They must continually focus on aligning the organization as an ongoing state and process evolution contextualized under specific external market conditions and internal capabilities, and draw upon individual cognitions, judgments, and routines, which involve new and evolving patterns of behavior and interactions with others. We argue that some leaders are more skillful in managing innovation than others. Most of the academic literature focuses on innovation management at the firm level and corresponding process frameworks. Far less attention is paid to how individual technology leaders use managerial capabilities to successfully deliver innovation through the firm's dynamic capabilities framework. The research premise for this study is that leadership's emotional intelligence and the organization's quality of relationships are micro-level behaviors that predict product innovation outcomes, and consequently organizational performance. We explore this proposition using the ESCI-U emotional intelligence inventory, and the Relational Climate Survey in a 360 multi-rater research design of 105 R&D leaders from different firms, along with their multi-raters, which we analyze using structural equation modeling (PLS). We find that product innovation success is predicted by the perceived quality of relationships within the organization, according to the subordinates, peers,and supervisors of the R&D leader, and that these relationships positively mediate the effects of emotional intelligence on product innovation success, and organizational performance. Ours is the first research is the first academic work that we are aware of that that focuses on how leaders shape the firm's dynamic capabilities for innovation through micro- level behaviors. We show that the organization's relational climate significantly influences product innovation and organizational outcomes. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that the effectiveness of the leader to drive innovation is significantly affected by how individuals perceive relationships at work in these shared dimensions of vision, compassion, and energy within the organization.
Keywords
emotion recognition, organizational behavior, Weatherhead School of Management, dynamic capabilities, microfoundations, innovation, entrepreneurship, positive and negative emotional attractors, strategy, emotional intelligence, relational climate, organizational climate, organizational learning, micro-level dynamic capabilities, managerial capabilities, resilience.
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Kendall, Lori D., "The Effects of Emotional Intelligence and Relational Climate of Innovation" (2015). Student Scholarship. 443.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/443