A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Izold Guihur and Gilles Marcoux
organizational performance such as innovativeness (Andries and Czarnitzki 2011). Small firms find it
difficult to adopt human capital programs since they are small in size and limited in resources. In
general, a formal function of human resource gets set only when the firm reaches a hundred of
employees (St-Ongeet al. 2009).As a result, small firms depend on the entrepreneur’s knowledge and
personal skills to manage the activities and the competences of their employees (Paradas 2007).
Human resource practices in small firms tend to remain informal and strongly tied to the
entrepreneur’s leadership.
Past research has shown that leadership influenced the organizational commitment of the employees
(Koreket al. 2010), which in turn, has been positively linked to innovative behaviours on the part of the
employees (Ng et al. 2010) and to innovation performance of the organization (Andries and Czarnitzki
2011). More specifically, it appears that transformational leadership plays an important role in the
development of an affective commitment towards the organization (Saint-Michel and Wielhorski 2011)
while it is such an affective commitment that mainly stimulates employees in adopting innovationrelated
behaviours (Ng et al. 2010).
Because of the lack of formal human resource practices in small firms and because of the central role
of the entrepreneur’s leadership, this research aims at understanding how the leadership range of the
entrepreneur may foster the employees’ commitment and the contribution of their knowledge to the
innovation process. This better understanding could help in bringing the innovation capabilities of the
firm from the individual innovativeness of the entrepreneur to the collective knowledge synergy of the
organization. Leadership as a means to encourage the employees’ participation in the innovation
process could also be of major importance for small firms where more formal human resource
practices seldom exist.
The following sections present the conceptual stage of this research. The concepts of leadership and
of organizational commitment are explained. Informal human resource practices relating to leadership
are examined for they could support organizational commitment. A model is then proposed that
suggests the use of transformational leadership and related informal human resource practices to
foster employees' organizational commitment, and to support the innovation performance of the firm.
This conceptual paper concludes on future research that could validate the model based on stuctural
equation modelling of the theoretical propositions.
2. Leadership of the entrepreneur
Leadership refers to the ability of an individual to influence, motivate and mobilize others in a lasting
manner for them to contribute to the group or to the organization efficacy (Bass and Avolio 1994).
Hence a leader is here defined as someone who is capable of guiding, influencing and inspiring
others.
Bass (1985) suggested that a same leader could adopt behaviours of transactional and
transformational leadership along a continuum described as the range of leadership. Transactional
leadership is characterized by daily exchanges being necessary between the leader and the followers
in order to reach the desired results, The transactional leader provides his followers with contingent
rewards in exchange for the objectives being set through role clarification (Bass and Avolio 1994). As
a result, transactional leadership applies to exchanges of economic nature, trying to achieve accrued
performances (Bass 1985). Indeed, Tremblay et al. (2005) report a positive relationship between
transactional leadership (through its contingent reward dimension), and in-role performance.
According to Bass and Avolio (1994), however, transactional leadership may be better suited for
stable environments but not as efficient in managing organizations confronted to dynamic
environments.
Transformational leadership, on the other hand, reaches beyond the daily performance since the
leader tries to transform a vision into reality (Bass and Avolio 1994). The transformational leader
enables the members of the organization to become more conscious of their important contribution.
Such a leader helps the followers in expanding their horizon beyond their personal interests in order
to achieve the mission of the organization. Four characteristics refer to the transformational leader: a)
the leader has an idealized influence causing employees to emotionally identify to their leader, to see
him as a model able to concretise a captivating vision that surpasses the actual reality; b) the leader
is a source of inspirational motivation as he brings employees to adhere to the organizational
objectives as being a meaningful cause; c) the leader stimulates intellectually his collaborators in
282