Enhancing employees' innovation activity through motivational factors

“Insightful Encounters - Regional Development and Practice–Based Learning”
Conference on Regional Development and Innovation Processes
March 5th-7th, 2008, Porvoo - Borgå, Finland
Introduction
Innovativeness has been considered one of the survival elements in the modern business
environment. In the closed innovation environments innovations and inventions have been
generated inside a company by their engineers and researchers. When competition has become
global, it has forced companies to open up their innovation activities. Knowledge diffusion has
accelerated enormously through the revolution of the Internet and during the last decade
knowledge and the skills to use it has become the most important resource for companies. Open
innovation philosophy (Chesbrough 2003; Dodgson et al. 2006) stress that the innovative ideas
can come also from outside the organisation.
The changing environment requires every organisation skills to observe proactively inside and
outside of organisation to spot the useful signals. As for creating conditions for effective
innovation, Bessant and Tidd (2007) come up with three critical phases. Firstly, a company needs
to have effective ways of searching the signals to generate innovation possibilities. Secondly, the
selecting of the good ideas with which to proceed needs to be strategic choices. Thirdly, the
implementation of ideas should be realised with balance of creativity and control.
The focus in this paper is finding ways to benefit from the proactive external linkages. One group
that has a lot of proactive linkages outside organisation is the salespeople. They constantly hear
the voice and opinions of the very important persons for the organisation: from the customers.
Traditionally the salespeople work has been individual performance and the customer knowledge
has been an asset of power in competition between salespeople. So the key question here is: How
to motivate the salespeople to share the customer knowledge? This paper aims to create
knowledge on how to motivate the salespeople to share their customer knowledge and discusses
the influence of executives on motivation.
How to accomplish motivated employees?
To successfully conduct change process in organisation, good leaders will try to affect to
employees’ motivation instead of giving orders. Motivation determinates what people really do
(Amabile 1998). Jobs can be assigned and they will be done adequately, but for employees to do
more than business as usual they need to feel motivated. Motivation helps individuals to develop,
as do organisational factors like management support, resources, work group features, reward
systems, adequate evaluation process, challenge and freedom (van Dijk & van den Ende 2002;
Amabile 1998).
Why motivation is still one of the most important factors while studying employees and
management in the organisation? The answer would be that in order to survive in nowadays
business, the motivation is the major issue to taken care of. The motivation is highly challenging
and continuously changing area, since motivational factors depends on lot of different matters for
example age, position, task, manager’s support and behavior, reward systems and so on.
There exists numerous ways to define the motivation concept. Even though motivation
approaches have been developed over the years, in most of them is possible to recognise features
from history, for example from Maslow's need-hierarchy theory or Herzberg's two-factor theory.
According to Kreitner (1995) motivation is the psychological process that gives behavior purpose
and direction. Buford et al. (1995) suggest that motivation is predisposition to behave in a
purposive manner to achieve specific, unmet needs. Higgins (1994) and Bedeian (1993) state that