Innovative Behaviour of Employees in Organizations: A Mapping Study

Abstract

Innovative behaviour can be referred as the introduction and application of new ideas, products, processes, and procedures to a person's work role or an organization. The aim of this mapping study is to investigate the areas regarding innovative behaviour of employees in software companies and also to find the research gap by using existing studies from 2008 to 2017. Aspects such as publication year and source, research type, factors affecting innovations and employee innovative behaviour and technologies have been concerned. The study was done by searching five electronic databases. Then the initial result ended up with 487 studies. After applying selection criteria to that result, a total number of 11 studies were selected. In the next stage snowballing and direct search was done to publications of researchers and research groups that accomplished these studies. This resulted in adding 6 more papers. Finally, 17 studies were identified addressing the research topic and answering research questions. A lot of studies were found regarding innovations in organizations and there were few studies about innovative behaviour of employees, but mapping study clearly shows an increase in the interest of the research topic in the recent years. Thus employees are the driving forces of innovations, most of the research papers discussing about innovations have also focused on the employee innovative behaviour. Besides, papers have discussed the factors affecting the employee innovative behaviour. Some of those papers have proposed innovative models to improve innovations. So as the conclusion, the findings show that innovative behaviour of employees is a very important area to consider to enhance innovations in organizations and also more studies should be done regarding the research topic.

KEYWORDS: Innovative behaviour, Innovations, Knowledge sharing