Innovation involvement due to individual orientations : the role of social value orientation and tertius Iungens orientation on innovation involvement in professional service firms

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Innovation Involvement due to Individual Orientations:

the Role of Social Value Orientation and Tertius Iungens Orientation on

Innovation Involvement in Professional Service Firms.

Naam - Annemiek Dekker, MSc

Student nummer - 5959446

Begeleider - Dr. Alexander Alexiev

Datum - 16 augustus 2015

Professional Service firms experience a struggle to get more innovative. To achieve this, the knowledge of the individual professionals has to be shared and integrated. The nature of these firms make it hard to control and steer innovation, because knowledge sharing is difficult to measure. It is therefore expected that individual orientations play a major role in knowledge sharing and innovation involvement in professional service firms. The study is done in a Dutch Professional service firm and shows that both Tertius Iungens orientation, the orientation to create network ties, and Social Value Orientation, whether individuals are more self-concerned or concerned in the common goal, enhance knowledge sharing and innovation involvement in Professional Service Firms.

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3.2 Measurement of Construct ... 35 covariables ... 37 3.3 Validation of Measures ... 38 Validation ... 38 4. Results ... 39 Hypothesis 1 ... 39 Hypothesis 2 ... 40 Hypothesis 3a ... 43 Hypothesis 3b ... 45 Hypothesis 4 ... 46 5. Conclusion ... 48 5.1 Main Conclusions ... 48 5.2 Methodological Issues ... 51 5.3 Discussion ... 53 5. References ... 61 Appendix – A: Codebook ... 67

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1. Introduction

In the end, the location of the new economy is not in the technology, be it the microchip or the global telecommunications network. It is in the human mind.

- Alan Webber -

In the last decades our world is vastly changing from a product-centered market towards a knowledge-based economy wherein Professional Service Firms (PSF) play an important role (Muller & Zenker, 2001). Within these knowledge intensive firms lies a strong emphasis on innovation for the creation of new services, management processes, marketing, design and customized solutions to create value and meet the demands of the customer (Djellal & Gallouj, 2001; Drejer, 2004). Creation of new knowledge through innovation involvement by individual employees requires a great amount of knowledge sharing in PSFs among employees (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006), because integrated knowledge of professionals is the main strategic asset (Greenwood, Li, Prakash, & Deephouse, 2005; Grant, 1996). Nevertheless, especially in PSFs the capability to integrate individual knowledge into a valuable service is a challenging capability for a firms’ success, because of the ambiguous nature of knowledge itself (Anand, Gardner, & Morris, 2007; Empson, 2001); the more intangible knowledge is, the harder it is to articulate and therefore to share (Zollo & Winter, 2002). Because the knowledge in PSFs is hard to articulate, firms have a hard time enhancing knowledge sharing and innovation involvement, because making policies for something so intangible is very difficult, if not impossible. Therefore, most of the knowledge integration in PSFs is dependent on informal interactions between individuals who have to put in time and effort to share knowledge for organizational goals.

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Social Capital Theory (SCT) states that value creation in organisations, especially in organisations where intellectual capital is the most imporant asset such as PSFs, relies on social networks (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). These social networks are the social capital of an organisation, which is a catalist for innovation. The central proposition in this theory is that social networks in an organization provide members with collectively owned capital, which increases value creation in organizations. Social capital theory states that the social capital consists of (1) structural capital, the ease of getting in touch with one another, (2) relational capital, the significance of the relationship, and (3) cognitive capital, consisting of shared language, norms and understaning. Despite that social capital is very important for PSFs, employees in PSFs are often discouraged to share knowledge, because of the individual costs of sharing (Lam & Lambermont-Ford, 2010). They are facing a highly competitive environment with high performance standards, time pressure and challenging projects (Greenwood, Hinings, & Brown, 1990; Quinn, Anderson & Finkelstein, 1998), but are nevertheless expected to engage in knowledge sharing behavior despite this behavior is difficult to evaluate (bartol & Srivastava, 2002). This makes knowledge sharing a social dilemma, based on an individual willingness to share knowledge, rather than a classic, rewarded exchange between employer and employee (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2002; Liang, Liu & Wu, 2008).

This thesis states that Social Capital Theory misses an important dimension, namely the individual orientations to engage in social networks within the organization. Tertius Iungens Orientation (TIO) and Social Value Orientation (SVO) are both considered antecedents of the three SCT dimensions of which social capital in organizations is made of. Social Value Orientation can be briefly explained as a personal predisposition or value to invest in common interests and value fair, equal outcomes when working with others (Van Lange, 1999; Schwartz, 2006). People can have different social orientations, such as an

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achievement orientation or universalism orientation. Schwartz (2006) state that these values are individual beliefs about what is important in life, they constitute abstract goals and guide behavior. SVO influences prosocial behavior between individuals and seems therefore a necessary addition to the SCT as it seems an important antecedent for the relational dimension. Tertius Iungens Orientation (TIO) is a strategic, behavioral orientation of individuals to build networks of people and knowledge by consciously bridging gaps in a network (Obstfeld, 2003). People who have a high TIO are more likely to act as a mediator in social interactions, meaning that they themselves and the individuals they connect can excess otherone’s knowledge and experience. TIO is a nessecary addition to SCT too, because of its influence on the structural dimension as an antededent.

Consequently, this thesis examines:

The influence of Social Value Orientation and Tertius Iungens Orientation on innovation involvement mediated by knowledge sharing in Professional Service Firms.

This paper contributes in three ways to develop more in depth knowledge on the subject on innovation in Professional Service Firms, namely by (1) measuring the coherence between SVO, TIO and innovation involvement directly, which will extent scientific knowledge about causes and antecedents of innovation involvement; (2) extending our knowledge of Social Capital Theory by researching more in depth knowledge on the individual antecedents of the SCT dimensions; and (3) focusing on Professional Service Firms specifically, because their knowledge, culture and incentive systems are very different from classical firms, but too often classical knowledge of innovation is applied, this focus will extent both the theoretical knowledge as well as the practical usage of it in the growing industry of knowledge intensive services.

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2. Theoretical background

While Edison cultivated the image of the lone inventor creating ideas from nothing, in truth most of the laboratory's inventions were improvements on existing products and drew from

ideas seen while working on similar problems in other industries.

- Hargadon -

2.1 Innovation in professional service firm

Importance of innovation

Innovation is undoubtedly one of the most important determinants for economic growth, well-being and a major factor in global challenges, such as health issues or environmental problems (OECD, 2007). Professional Service firms are found to contribute to macroeconomic growth due to internal innovations in a highly challenging environment (Muller & Zenker, 2001). Also on firm level, innovation is a significant driver to sustain superior performance (Hogan, Soutar, McColl-Kennedy & Sweeny, 2011). In this vastly changing world wherein services and high end-products become more important, innovation in these services is crucial. Innovation is a means to create value in firms and to meet the changing needs of their customers, to find more efficient ways to produce, to explore new markets and to reach a sustained competitive advantage (Schumpeter, 1934). Because innovation is an ambiguous term, used in a wide array of situations, there is no consensus over the definition. Innovation can be seen as the development of new products, services or processes for either the world, the market or the firm. Innovation can also be seen as sustaining your products on the market by improving or altering them slightly over time, a breakout innovation, meaning moving a product to a whole new level of quality or user friendliness and disruptive innovation, developing something totally new (Garcia, 2010).

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These different kinds of innovation have different impacts on our environment, but need the same kind of innovative thinking, creativity and open-mindedness from firms to be achieved.

Innovation is the result of a company’s effort to apply and deploy ideas from their employees. Much emphasis in innovation literature lies on the idea creation, although innovation is often thought to be the result process of different stages, leading to new products, services or processes. Zmud (1982) differentiated between the initiation and the implementation stage. Initiation can be seen as the development of the innovative idea and implementation is rather the process in which the idea is inverted into a new product, process or service. According to Hogan et al. (2011) the creation of innovative ideas in the initiation stage is determined by a company’s innovation capability, which is defined as “a firm’s ability, relative to its competitors, to apply the collective knowledge, skills and resources to innovation activities relating to new products, processes, services, or management, marketing or work organization systems, in order to create added value for the firm or its stakeholders” (p.1266). Innovation is crucial to a firm’s sustainable competitive advantage, because innovation capability can be seen as a valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable resource (Barney, 1991). Innovation capability is seen as combining individual creativity to create new, collective knowledge applicable to idea generation, leading to innovations. Grant (1996) states that the integration of knowledge is the most important organizational capability a firm can have, and links the integration of individual knowledge within firms directly to their competitive advantage.

The way in which innovation is perceived has changed over time and varies over different industries. After Solow had found in 1957 that innovation is the main driver of growth in organizations, the innovation paradigm became dominant, meaning that innovation capability of firms was associated with a strong research and development department (Gassman, 2006). This paradigm caused that firms strategy was focused on gaining or

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maintaining a competitive advantage by creating new knowledge by internal research and development of new products, leading to temporary monopolistic profits. An example of such an industry is the smartphone business, where new technology determines the competitive advantage for a short time, before competitors have imitated the product, but not the R&D qualities and innovation capability of the firm. Currently Professional Service Firms are a large part of national economies and are also struggling for a competitive advantage in the tough market. The competitive advantage of service firms is based on something different than monopolistic loans of new technological discoveries. These service firms’ long term performance is also based on innovation, but this kind of innovation cannot be determined by an independent R&D department. Professional service firms are more dependent on the creativity and knowledge of their professional workforce and their willingness to integrate their knowledge with colleagues to develop new services: their innovation involvement. The nature and micro-foundations of innovation capability of traditional firms seems therefore somewhat different from that of PSFs.

Innovation in PSFs

Innovation in traditional manufacturing firms, can be enhanced by investing in the R&D department. This department is solely occupied with developing new products and investigating the customer demand to enhance the chances of successful innovations. A successful, innovative manufacturer is therefore a company which can both explore new opportunities and exploit existing products, also called ambidexterity (Teece, 2007). Ambidexterity in the service industry is also essential, but is quite different from the traditional innovation theories. In the early ’50s, a new view on manufacturers became dominant. This innovation paradigm stressed the importance of innovation, because the velocity of different industries was increasing and firm had to adapt to the changing environment. The dominant way to do so was building or maintaining a strong R&D

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department, which would work separately from other departments on innovation (Gassman, 2006). Via market analysis, creative and technically proficient staff, this department would provide opportunities for the rest of the company to exploit. The common assumption was that a strong R&D department enhanced the adaptability and therefore the long term competitive advantage and sanity of the company.

Despite some Professional Service Firms (PSFs) that derive their innovation capability from a separate R&D department, most PSF innovations seem not suitable for this kind of isolated innovation processes. Professional service firms are organizations that provide services in a particular area of expertise within one of 14 professional service areas or business segments: (1) healthcare, (2) business, (3) consulting, (4) insurance, (5) legal, (6) financial services, (7) real estate, (8) counseling, (9) architecture, (10) engineering, (11) political advisory, (12) marketing, (13) staffing services, and (14) education (Baschab & Piot, 2004). The professional service firm is distinctive from other firms, because they have a high knowledge intensity, they are low in capital intensity and their workforce consists of professionals (Von Nordenflycht, 2010).

The underlying reason that innovation in PSFs is different from ‘traditional’ innovation is because the product, a complex service, is very different from a tangible product. PSFs are per definition firms ‘whose primary assets are a highly educated workforce and whose outputs are intangible services that are encoded with complex knowledge (Greenwood, Li, Prakash, & Deephouse, 2005). The professional services provided by these firms are usually sold on a contractual basis and makes knowledge and experience in a specialized vocation accessible to other parties. These services are founded in extensive intellectual training which translates into a specialized or professional service (Baschab & Piot, 2004). This means that the knowledge of the professionals within this firm is essential for the firm’s existence and that therefore the knowledge and experience available to the

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separate R&D department can never substitute or use the knowledge of individual professionals in an adequate way. As Blindenbach-Driessen and Van den Ende (2014) conclude from their research, Professional Service Firms seem to benefit less from a separate innovation unit, in terms of exploration, exploitation and ambidextrous performance, than manufacturing firms. The origin of this reduced impact of a separate R&D department, lies in knowledge loss when client contact, high-end service knowledge and innovation competencies are divided into different departments. Therefore, innovations in PSFs are in general a result of creative ideas and problem solving within or between employees from several business units.

Innovation Involvement

The innovative capability of the Professional Service Firm lies in the individual employee. This research specifically focusses on the innovation involvement of the employee, suggesting that when individual innovation involvement is enhanced within a PSF, the firms innovation capability is enhanced accordingly. An employee involved in innovation can anticipate better on customer demand, enhance the quality of services sold or make the organization itself more efficient. Since the value PSFs create is a result of specialized knowledge of their individuals and individual knowledge is strategically the most important resource of the firm, this experience, knowledge and skills in a specialized vocation are needed to innovate in a specialized field and to fully understand the environment. Only someone who is deeply rooted and fully understands a certain field, can think within this field of new practices, processes of services (in other words: innovate). Innovation involvement is defined as one or a combination of the following behaviors: idea generation, idea promotion or idea realization (Kanter, 1988; Janssen, 2001). Innovation involvement is not only the behavior that helps an innovation to come to life within an organization, but also the generation, promotion or realization of ideas that do not, in the end, become innovations but

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are not used by the organization. Idea generation is the creative process to think of and come to an idea, idea promotion is the process in which the idea is promoted to others within the organization to mobilize support and idea realization means the implementation of the idea in its practical form.

The essence of the organizational innovation capability is the capability of the firm to adequately integrate the knowledge possessed by their professionals into a valuable innovation (Grant, 1996). The reason why innovation in PSF’s is different from innovation in traditional firms is that the nature of the knowledge and the services developed need an integrated knowledge network in order to be innovative more than any other industry.

2.2 Social Capital Theory

Social Capital Theory (SCT) stresses the importance of networks for innovation in organizations via combining and exchanging knowledge. SCT builds on the distinction between psychical capital and human capital, traditionally seen as the main resources for a firm, with proposing a third valuable resource: social capital. The term social capital originates from the sociology, in which it stressed the importance of social networks in communities as a basis for action to improve collective circumstances (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). The central proposition of the SCT is that networks and relationships constitute a valuable resource, because it provides individuals with collective knowledge and experiences, which can benefit them in various ways (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). Social Capital Theory is often defined differently, but in this paper the most common scientific definition for business science is used:

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Social Capital is the sum of the actual and potential resources embedded within, available through, and derived from the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social unit (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998; Bourdieu, 1986; Burt, 1992).

When addressing Social Capital, there is often a distinction made between structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions. These dimensions are thought to be linked, but independently contribute to a business’ Social Capital.

The structural dimension highlights the importance of accessibility to other participant’s knowledge in the network, existing of network ties, network configuration and appropriable organization. This dimension is best described as who is reached and how he or she is reached. Structural embeddedness of Social Capital consists of i.a. an intranet, project teams, meetings, brainstorm sessions and a collective lunch in which ideas are proposed (Naphiet & Ghoshal, 1998). The stronger the network, the more dense the network is. In a dense network, knowledge sharing is more frequent, which results in more collective knowledge. It is expected in this thesis that Tertius Iungens Orientation is an antecedent of the structural SCT dimension, because it enhances network ties and network configuration by bringing people together and creating social bonds.

The relational dimension describes the strength and the amount of interpersonal relationships within the firms network, existing of trust, norms and obligations and expectations. When individuals have frequent contact which they perceive positively, they become used to having a trusting exchange relationship with the other person (Naphiet & Ghoshal, 1998), with clear norms and expectations. The strength of the relation between people will cause more collective knowledge because they engage more in behaviors such as exchanging knowledge and helping one another. In this thesis it is expected that SVO is an antecedent of the relational SCT dimension, because individual values for equality and doing

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good for one another, will give the opponent trust that the individual will not take advantage of the relationship but will invest in common interest.

The cognitive dimension concerns the shared beliefs and representations of individuals, but also shared language and codes, which helps to understand each other. When people have the same representations of their work, the organizational goals and the world as a whole, collective knowledge from people with the same background can be understood more easily (Naphiet & Goshal, 1998). Take for example person A and person B who both have a different specialization in law. When a case for a client is proposed to person A, who looks at it from a civil law point of view, the help from person B, who comes up with an intellectual property solution, can be difficult to be understood by person A, because of their different focus. When representations, norms, beliefs and languages are shared, knowledge is more easily shared and understood, contributing to Social Capital.

Social capital thus enhances cooperative behavior and knowledge sharing through social network which contain collective knowledge. Social Capital helps to make information diffusion more effective by minimizing redundancy through building new, and strengthening existing, social ties (Burt, 1992). However, Social Capital theory focusses mostly on organizational and interpersonal dimensions of social networks, but neglect the active role individuals have in sharing knowledge and building networks (Obstfelt, 2005). Before analyzing the individual role in innovation and as an antecedent of SCT, the role of knowledge sharing in Professional Service Firms will be analyzed more closely.

2.3 Knowledge Sharing

As Grant explains in his 1996 paper, consistent and embedded knowledge sharing in firms is in today’s society the most significant resource for sustainable competitive advantage.

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Knowledge sharing is essential for value creation within companies, because it enhances innovation through combining and exchanging knowledge (Schumpeter, 1934). Knowledge exists at multiple levels in organizations, namely: individual level, group level and organizational level (De Long & Fahey, 2000). Organizational knowledge and group knowledge, also known as collective knowledge, is a result of knowledge sharing between individuals in social networks. Therefore the concept of individual knowledge is first defined, before knowledge sharing is discussed.

Individual knowledge

Individual knowledge is in this paper seen as an adequate understanding of facts, concepts and their relationship and the basic foundation of information a person needs to perform a task (Goldstein, 1993). This definition thus includes both directly applicable knowledge to perform a task (such as knowledge how to write a quotation for a certain job in a consulting firm) and information that can possibly help an employee perform his or her job in the future (e.g. experience with diversification issues in the steel industry which can come in handy when another comparable case will come up). This knowledge an individual has can be distinguished as explicit and tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1966): explicit knowledge is relatively easy codifiable and transmissible, because one knows he or she has this knowledge and can therefore construe his or her specific knowledge for others to understand and use. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is difficult to covey because of the ambiguity of the knowledge and because the bearer of knowledge is not always aware of what knowledge he or she possesses. Explicit knowledge can be seen as “knowing what”, whereas tacit knowledge can be seen as “knowing how”. When a researcher publishes his or her research, people who read it have the knowledge of what is researched, what the outcomes were and how the paper contributes to the existing theory. The researcher, however, knows how this research has been done, which methods would possibly made a difference in meaning of variables or outcomes

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and which variables were not included and why. The whole background of the research and the theoretical field is known, and that will make that this researcher is much more experienced to do follow up studies about this subject then a fellow scientist, despite that he or she did a good job in bringing over the meaning of the research.

Thus individual knowledge is the basis for a company’s innovation capability, but only when it is shared. As Grant (1996) said, “If knowledge is a critical input into all production processes, if efficiency requires that it is created and stored by individuals in specialized form, and if production requires the application of many types of specialized knowledge, then the primary role of the firm is the integration of knowledge.” Knowledge sharing is key to sustainable competitive advantage in a firm and a main driver for innovation. Opportunities to innovate are created by integrating different knowledge, skills and abilities of employees. This individual knowledge is often specialized and used by an employee to perform his or her task (Grant, 1996). Through knowledge sharing, multiple individuals can exchange their knowledge, skills and abilities, which results in new shared understandings. A combination of different individual ideas can which can result in something better, something more efficient or sometimes even completely new ideas and possibly even new products or services (a.k.a. innovation) because unexplored knowledge areas are being integrated (Kogut and Zander, 1992, cited in Grant, 1996). Knowledge sharing can therefore be defined as a social interaction culture, involving the exchange of employees knowledge, experience and skills through the department or whole organization (Hsui-Fen Lin, 2007), and it holds both help seeking and help giving behaviors (Mueller & Kamdar, 2011; Hargadon & Bechky, 2006).

Knowledge Sharing

Despite the importance of knowledge sharing for innovation, it is hard to attain. Organizational level capabilities, such as innovation capability, are highly dependent on the

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individual innovation involvement of employees, because they create, attain, share and use knowledge (grant, 1996). According to Nahapiet & Ghoshal (1998) Intellectual Capital in an organization is the product of combination and exchange of knowledge. When combination and exchange are desired by the organization, individuals must share their knowledge. Mueller and Kamdar (2011) and Hargadon and Becky (2006) describe help giving and help seeking as factors of knowledge sharing. They propose that knowledge sharing exists when individuals assist each other with work-related problems by help seeking or help giving. Help giving is the social interaction to respond to an implicit or explicit request for help in a timely manner (hargadon & Bechky, 2006). It can be described as a willing collaboration that is in that moment in time costly to the individual doing the sharing and beneficial for the individual who receives help.

For knowledge sharing, Grant (1996) identifies two primary knowledge integration mechanisms for companies to use for knowledge creation through sharing. The first one is direction. Direction is a relatively effortless and easy way to transfer knowledge among employees, because it involves codifying tacit knowledge into specific rules and instructions. An example of direction is for a chemist to write down every simple step of how to make a certain product to allow a new subsidiary to learn the process. You can write everything down in detail: how to mix certain liquids, how long they need to be cooled at which temperature, etc., etc. With this manual a new employee has enough information to make the product without needing a masters in chemistry and loads of lab experience. The problem is tough, that there has been a substantial amount of knowledge loss, because the employee does not understand the process and cannot act when something out of the manual will come up. A direction is certainly not a way in which knowledge creation in enhanced, because this new employee will not be capable of increasing the quality of the product or developing new ones due to the lack of deep understanding.

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The second mechanism is organizational routines. Employees and organizations can learn by watching a professional do his or her organizational routine. In this way you do not have to make all the knowledge explicit and articulation is not needed. However, this second mechanism has some crucial setbacks. First of all, this mechanism relies heavily on informal procedures of organizational roles and interactions. Secondly, the receiver of the knowledge must understand the actions deeply enough. Thirdly, reaching the same kind of understanding and transferring the entire body of knowledge is almost impossible and significant knowledge loss will take place. Last of all, the most important setback is that when work is not visible, e.g. when it is done with the brain instead of the hands, organizational routines will not be able to transfer knowledge of the job. This means that for all knowledge work organizational routines as a mechanism is useless and this can therefore not be used in PSFs.

For professional service firms, The problem is that knowledge in specialized individuals is often not articulated, or even explicit. As Polanyi already noticed in 1966, “we know more than we can tell”. Especially in Professional Service Firms, the specialized work force relies for the most part on knowledge they collected in their career, study and other experiences and they deploy that knowledge in their work. This tacit knowledge can be applied in a conscious matter, but it can also be prior experience which unconsciously influences a preference for a certain solution of the task on hand. Tacit knowledge therefore is not only hard to articulate when one is conscious of its existence, people are often not aware of all the knowledge they possess which is, or can be, applicable to their job. Therefore these traditional mechanisms for knowledge sharing are not applicable anymore in the knowledge intensive companies from this centrury. In Professional Service Firms, the processes for knowledge sharing are more ambiguous and non-controllable for the organization, as is the knowledge itself.

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Knowledge Sharing in PSFs

How can knowledge be adequately transferred in a Professional Service Firm? In professional service firms, most of the knowledge used for the service is tacit thus sharing it via direction involves severe knowledge loss and will therefore not be the best way to create new knowledge via sharing. Knowledge sharing via organizational routines in a Professional Service Firm quite difficult is, because most of the work is done inside the head of the employee. The receiver does not learn a lot from observation, because the mind is a black box. How could tacit knowledge in PSFs than be shared effectively for knowledge creation? I suppose this is done via direct, informal interaction between professionals.

To attain innovation in Professional Service Firms, there is a collective effort needed (Sundbo, 1997). A number of individuals have to come together and share their knowledge to handle situations in a different way, because of the new knowledge combinations coming into existence when sharing knowledge. According to Hargadon and Bechky (2006), these behaviors can be reinforced by a supportive organizational culture, encouraging employees to act as a collective and to solve problems with collective creativity and coming up with new ideas. The importance of a supporting culture for knowledge sharing is often seen as important for integrating knowledge of individuals. A supporting culture comes often down to compensate employees time spent on knowledge sharing and having managers value knowledge sharing in e.g. performance interviews. A prerequisite for this is that knowledge sharing must be measurable by the organization.

The possibility of measuring knowledge sharing is dependent on a large quantity of variables whereof the situation in which knowledge is shared is definitely an important one. There seem to be four mechanisms in which knowledge can be shared in organizations (Bartol & Srivastava, 2002): (1) knowledge databases, which requires knowledge codification and can be seen as Grants’ direction. (2) Formal interactions, which are formal meetings, project

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teams and so forth who are acknowledged and paid by the organization to share their knowledge for collective problem solving. (3) Communities of practice are often online forums where people from all over the world help each other purely out of interest for the subject. And informal interactions (4) is the third mechanism in which knowledge is shared in organizations. This communication is seen as the coffee-machine talks about work-related problems, asking for help to a colleague who has faced a similar client before or who has a great amount of knowledge about a subject due to his or her interests. These informal interactions take place all the time, and seem to be the most important mechanism for knowledge sharing in PSFs and especially for new knowledge creation in PSFs because this is the most common way in which parties from different departments meet and learn about each other’s specialist field. Therefore a relationship between knowledge sharing in informal interactions and innovation in PFSs is expected.

H1: Knowledge sharing, a.k.a. help seeking and help giving, is positively related with innovation involvement in Professional Service Firms.

When knowledge is shared in informal interactions, it is difficult to evaluate and fall more toward a social exchange relationship between the employer and the employee (Bartol & Srivastava, 2002). We state in this paper that not only the employee and the organization have a mutual social exchange relationship regarding knowledge sharing in PSFs, but so do employees among each other. And the individual orientation is a very important cause or inhibitant of knowledge sharing and thus the development of Social Capital within organizations.

Knowledge Sharing in PSFs as a Social Dilemma

PSFs are per definition firms ‘whose primary assets are a highly educated workforce and whose outputs are intangible services that are encoded with complex knowledge (Greenwood,

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Li, Prakash & Deephouse, 2005). This definition reveals two dependencies in PSFs (1) a service firm is highly dependent on its professional workforce, and (2) a service firm is dependent of the knowledge asymmetry between the firm and its clients (and favorably also the firm and its competitors). Therefore it is in the firm’s best interest to try to maintain the professional workforce, because the intellectual capital of those individuals is the main source of competitive advantage.

Individual motivation for knowledge sharing in PSFs seems therefore different than in classic organizations. The reason is the extensive dependency of PSFs on the individual knowledge of their professional workforce (Greenwood, Li, Prakash & Deephouse, 2005).. The legitimacy of a PSF is the quality of the intellectual capital, which worth is sold to their customers. But compared to classic firms, the value creating resource is not owned by the company, but lies in the heads of the professional workforce. That makes the PSF highly dependent of its workforce and willing to invest in the retention of human capital. For retention of human capital, a lot of PSFs have a harsh culture giving incentives such as career opportunities, high salaries and intellectual challenges to only their top employees (Greenwood, Hinings, & Brown, 1990).

Especially law firms are known for their “up-or-out” promotion system, which placed employees after certain work experience in a position where they can either be promoted as a partner, or they are expected to quit or are dismissed (Morris & Pinnington, 1998). The chances of being promoted to partner for any newly hired trainee are generally low, around 10-20% in big American Law Firms (Harper, 2012). The optimistic expectations of new law-associates to work at these big firms are compared by Harper (2012) as the irrational behavior of drug-dealing gangs: the legions of foot soldiers who work the streets who seek to become one day a kingpin. The pressure of outperforming colleagues to get promoted and not being dismissed are very high at PSFs (Morris & Pinnington, 1998) and will elicit high performance

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standards for employees, but can be a barrier for knowledge sharing. Quinn, Anderson and Finkelstein (1998) find that heavy internal competition and frequent performance appraisal and feedback are common in outstanding performing PSFs and that the great organizations are unabashed meritocracies.

Notwithstanding the positive impact on the motivation and performance of individual employees, this internal competition can adversely affect knowledge integration between different departments or individuals needed for innovative solutions needed for firm survival. Hargadon and Bechky (2006) argue that there is a need for social interactions between individuals which trigger new interpretations and new discoveries of distant analogies that the individuals involved couldn’t have generated thinking on their own. This collective knowledge, generated by social ties between, seems contrary to internal competition apparent in most PSFs, because knowledge sharing can place an employee in a vulnerable position (Cyr &choo, 2010; Liang, Liu & Wu, 2008; Lin, 2007).

Especially in PSFs knowledge sharing can be a risk for the individual, because most knowledge in PSFs is tacit, of high complexity and shared via informal interactions (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006). These characteristics makes knowledge sharing difficult to evaluate, because the individual contributions cannot be measured adequately (Bartol & Srivastava, 2002). Knowledge sharing not only costs the informer time and money, but also gives the receiver the opportunity to exploit this new knowledge for their own interests instead for the benefits of the organization. The receiver can use that knowledge to improve their own products and, as a result, even might have a better change on promotion to partnership than the informer. Sharing tacit knowledge is therefore a form of sharing power with others (Lin, 2007). There are thus costs for the employee doing the sharing and benefits for the recipient of the knowledge (Cyr & Choo, 2010). Therefore, knowledge sharing is based on social exchange relationship between employees instead of a part of the task

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performance. Due to this reason, knowledge sharing between employees in informal interactions in a PSF can be seen as a social dilemma.

A social dilemma is a situation wherein personal and collective goals are not consistent and an individual has to weigh the different interests and make a decision between either one, but is strongly dependent on others choices (De Cremer & Van Lange, 2001). In case of a social dilemma, everyone wants to reach the common goal, but that will only happen when enough individuals contribute to that goal at expense of their own interests. A known example of such a social dilemma is global warming. It is in every citizens interest that global warming is slowed down or even stopped or reversed, because it causes environmental deterioration, such as more floats, species will go extinct and the air becomes polluted. Preventing global warming is the common goal in which every individual should be committed to reach. A counteractive measure for global warming could be to have everyone turn the central heating system down a bit and to produce less waste. These are little inconveniences for individuals that can affect the likeliness to reach the common goal if everyone invests. However, in reality this is not the case, because people will not give individual offers when they are too dependent on unknown others.

When an employee decides to share his or her knowledge a colleague could use that knowledge for individual benefit, without reciprocate knowledge. After all, the exchange relationship is built upon the reciprocal acts of individuals “without negotiation of terms and without the knowledge of whether or when the other will reciprocate” (Molm, Takahashi & Peterson, 2000). In a quite competitive organizational culture, such as PSFs, this can be a risk of the individual sharing the knowledge and it is therefore expected that individual orientations are an essential addition to Social Capital Theory, especially in PSFs.

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23 2.3 Individual orientations

Social Capital Theory focusses on the importance of networks for innovation within firms. SCT identifies structural, relational and psychological dimensions influencing the social networks and inducing collective knowledge needed for innovation. In this paper it is argued that SCT would be more complete if individual orientations are added as an important antecedent of social networks and cause of innovation involvement within organizations.

Individual values are important in defining us for who we are. Our personal values determine what is important in our lives, they define our goals and the corresponding motivation to reach them. Schwartz (2006) states that personal values have a broad range of features. Firstly they are strong, personal beliefs, tied inextricably to emotion. Secondly, they are a motivational construct, guiding people to the goals they want to achieve. Thirdly, they transcend specific actions or situations, because of their abstract meaning to individuals. Fourth, they serve as standards or criteria, when individuals have difficult decisions to make. Fifth, values have a hierarchical feature, meaning that every individual has their own order of importance for values. In a nutshell, these values define who we are, what we want to become and how we want the world we live in to be.

It is expected that these values play an important motivational role by knowledge sharing in PSFs. More than an isolated action, knowledge sharing in PSFs seems to reflect the degree in which someone finds it important to build meaningful social relationships, to help each other and to invest in the common goal. Personal traits and values are thus seen as determinants for knowledge sharing behavior.

Classical motivational theories identify two motives for behavior: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, dependent on the task someone is doing. Intrinsic motivation causes individuals to put effort into something purely for the pleasure of doing so. An example of

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this is reading a book. When you find reading joyful and prefer to do this behavior in your spare time, regardless of whether or not the book will make you smarter, this is called intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is behavior that is shown when the outcome is rewarding, or not behaving in such a way will have negative consequences. Skipping a delicious ice cream to lose weight is an example of extrinsic motivation. We do not want to skip the ice cream, but we do it because of the consequences of that behavior, namely that eating an icecream adds to our weight. Regarding knowledge sharing in Professional Service Firms, seems more related to the person than to the task if someone engages in help seeking and help giving, therefore social orientations seem to play a role. Personal values have a strong motivational aspect and when an individuals’ values are aligned with social interaction and perhaps even altruistic behavior, these values can intrinsically motivate us to engage in knowledge sharing in our firm.

In this thesis, two active roles of individuals and the accompanying personal orientations to innovation involvement are outlined and compared with each other. These personal orientations are expected to contribute to Social Captial Theory by focusing on individual motivation to engage in social interaction, whereas SCT describes network aspects, trust, accessibility and expertise as determinants of innovation involvement.

Tertius Iungens Orientation (TIO) is a strategic orientation of an individual toward connecting people in one’s social network (Obstfelt, 2005). This orientation is found to influence a person’s innovation involvement (Obstfelt, 2005). Social Value Orientation (SVO) is a social orientation dependent on personal values driving an individual to either behave in a self-interested way or behave in the interest of the collective. In this paper it is expected that SVO and TIO are important predictive variables for innovation involvement because it determines the amount of knowledge sharing an individual engages in.

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Tertius Iungens Orientation

Tertius Iungens Orientation´s literal translation is “the third who joins”, which means to build a bridge over water in Old Latin literature. (Obstfeld, 2005). TIO builds on the proposition that knowledge is imperfectly shared over time and across people, organizations and industries (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997). The concept of TIO is the opposite of the older Tertius Gaudens Orientation of Schimmel in the 1950’s. Whereas Tertius Gaudens means “the third who enjoys”, indicating that the third party who introduces two parties can inherently benefit from this position and continues to actively separate these parties to protect his or her position. is the one coming up first. Tertius Iungens means quite the opposite; the third who joins two separate parties adds the most value by bridging a gap in the network.

Tertius Iungens is seen as a strategic, behavioral orientation of individuals to build networks of people and knowledge by consciously bridging gaps in a network. According to Obstfeld (2005), this bridging can be achieved by either introducing disconnected individuals in one’s network or by facilitating new coordination between connected individuals. Tertius Iungens, as well as Tertius Gaudens, are linked to theories about social network and brokering. Especially Burt addresses these to his Structural Holes Theory, by which he meant that some networks are less dense than others, leaving opportunities in the “holes” of the network (Obstefeld, 2005;Burt, 1997). When two parties with different backgrounds, ideas or specialisms are linked by a third party, this fills the structural hole and is a place where innovation and creativity can arise (Burt, 1997).

Hargadon and Sutton (1999) state that innovation is not a mysterious process, but that the best innovators use existing knowledge or ideas in a different context to innovate. To apply knowledge in a new setting, is called knowledge brokering. From psychology, problem solving studies explain why knowledge brokering is a good base for innovation (Reeves & Weisburg, 1994; Bazerman & Moore, 2008). When individuals face a familiar problem, they

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use experience and knowledge used for similar challenges and do not go out of the way to assess the problem thoroughly. However, when facing new information or new challenges, individuals try to apply their knowledge and experience from deviant problems to find a solution for this new situation (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). They need to adjust current knowledge and assess new situations and this combination will provide room for innovation. Meaning that knowledge brokers allow that knowledge of different employess can be exchanged and combined to create novel knowledge (Hargadon, 1999).

Tertius iungens orientation is an individual orientation regarding network ties. This orientation causes the formation of new network ties by introducing people, which can increase the former disconnected individuals to connect and hereby increase knowledge sharing between them and increases knowledge available to the individual him- or herself enhancing his or her own knowledge sharing (Obstfeld, 2005; Tasselli, 2015). On one hand, people who have a high TIO are more likely to act as a mediator and non-participant in social interactions, meaning that not per se themselves, but rather the individuals he or she connects can excess each other’s knowledge and experience. On the other hand has research found that individuals who are more central in a professional network and span across more groups, the more likely they are to deduct knowledge from which they can profit themselves and can enhance their innovation involvement. Burt (2001) found that individuals who “do better are somehow better connected”, most likely because they can use their network ties to ask for help themselves. In this thesis we expect that both processes, bridging gaps in network for others and being in a better position to profit from knowledge sharing, are likely to enhance innovation in professional service firms, but that the innovation involvement of the individual is more influenced by the latter (see Taselli, 2015). We therefore expect that Tertius Iungens orientation enhances knowledge sharing in professional service firms, and that TIO is also positively related to Innovation Involvement due to knowledge sharing.

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H2a: Tertius Iungens orientation is positively related with help giving and help seeking in Professional Service Firms.

H2b: Knowledge sharing will mediate the relation between Tertius Iungens Orientation and Innovation involvement.

On the other hand, Simon and Tellier (2011) showed in their study that there is also a negative effect of networks. Sometimes, individuals make one-way use of the network by only gaining information to expand their interests or to gain credibility. It thus seems that not only network ties, but more specifically, individual motivation to share knowledge can stabilize and strengthen networks and shape the opportunities that result from it.

Social Value Orientation

In social exchange situations, individuals are known to use a cost-benefit analyses to determine if they want to engage in the social exchange. This is often an individual appraisal of trust in the coworker, earlier experiences with social exchanges and the risk of that social exchange thus the outcome in the worst scenario that your behavior is not returned by the receiver. But there has been much discussion if individual’s motivation to contribute in social dilemmas is merely an analysis of the individual to maximize their own interest, or that other, more altruistic motivations can play a role. The concept of social value orientation looks at the individual predisposition towards (non)cooperative behavior. Social Value Orientation (SVO) is seen as a preference in behavior of one individual which is constant through time and different situations, much like a personality trait. There are three SVOs identified across different people: those who are prosocial, those who are individualistic and those who are competitive (Van Lange et al., 1999). This means that people with these different SVOs differ systematically in the way they approach others in social settings. Prosocials (around half of the people) are individuals which are known to prefer to approach others cooperatively and

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sometimes choose therefore to put themselves into a vulnerable position towards them. Individualists (also around half of us) are most concerned with their own interests and their behaviors in social settings are steered by this self-concern. Competitors (a small percentage of people) are mostly concerned to outperform others. They are focused on the relative performance of themselves in accordance to others and try to maximize that difference. Van Lange (1999) combined both competitors and individualists in a group called “proselfs”, because their behavior is comparable in social dilemma’s.

In this paper we will also use the prosocial versus the proself orientations within the knowledge sharing dilemma. Prosocials are individuals who focus on joint outcomes instead of individual interests and also focus strongly on equality in outcomes. Prosocials also frame social dilemmas differently than proselfs. Whereas prosocials prefer others who cooperate and think it is ethical and eligible to be cooperative, proselfs focus on their own interests in social dilemma’s and see others who cooperate as more submissive and less intelligent (Van Lange & Liebrand, 1991). Prosocial individuals frame social dilemmas more as a social dilemma whereas proself frame it as a power struggle (Van Lange & Kuhlman, 1994). A large amount of research has indicated that prosocial individuals behave in a collective rational manner, meaning that they want to invest in collective interest of equity outcomes but they depend their behavior strongly on the behavior of others. Because we invest two sorts of knowledge sharing behaviors, namely help giving and help seeking, we will analyze all three of the behaviors for proselfs and for prosocials. Logically, the individual investment in the knowledge sharing dilemma is bigger when giving help and smaller when asking for help. It is therefore likely that these behaviors will have diverse outcomes. This bring us to hypothesis three.

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H3a: Prosocials will share more knowledge than proselfs overall and especially enact more in help giving behaviors than proselfs.

H3b: Knowledge sharing will mediate the relation between Social Value Orientation and Innovation involvement.

Despite that behaviors of proself and prosocial orientations are quite stable over time, there are many covariables influencing the actual behaviors of both in social dilemma’s. People who act more in a proself manner ultimately behave out of rational self-interest, indicating that they will not engage in sharing information because this will always cost time and effort, and above that will sometimes put them in a vulnerable position, making importance of information meaningful for their choice to share knowledge. Steinel, Utz and Koning (2010) found some different results about proselfs; they sometimes do engage in knowledge sharing, but only when in benefits their rational self-interest because knowledge sharing is rewarded in some way by the company. This behavior can be seen as impression management. Prosocials have a preference to share knowledge and contribute to the common good, a company’s innovation. However, this does not mean that they always contribute to the common goal, because prosocials focus on equal division of outcomes, meaning that they will only keep sharing knowledge when their counterparts reciprocate. In the coming paragraphs, importance of information, rewards for knowledge sharing and trust in the coworker are all analyzed as will be analyzed further as moderators.

Organizational rewards

Organizational rewards are the most common way in which individual behavior is steered by the management. The social exchange perspective assumes that the relationship between employees and their employer is built on the trade of effort and loyalty for benefits such as pay, support and recognition (Van Knippenberg & Sleebos, 2006). Although knowledge

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sharing is approached in this paper as a result of individual motivation to share, because it is hard to monitor in PSFs, it is essential to incorporate the role of the firm as well. Liang, Liu & Wu (2008) found that organizational support, defined as a broad sense that the firm is caring of the employees well-being, does not correlate with individual knowledge sharing behavior. This finding might indicate that organizational support is too vague of an incentive to engage in knowledge sharing, because it does not elicit performance, but rather elicits the attitude of employees (Liang et al., 2008).

More concrete organizational rewards do show a positive relationship with knowledge sharing (Liang et al., 2008). Rewards systems can broadly be seen as incentives that the organization provides to employees to shape their behavior (Cabrera & Bonache, 1999). They are based on performance measurement and include things like recognition, promotions, bonuses or a higher salary (Hargadon, 1998) to give employees adequate feedback and direction to steer their behavior in preferred ways.

The current study suspects that both innovation involvement and knowledge sharing will increase when employees perceive that they get contingent rewards for that behavior. However, this study expects that the reason and the degree of the increase will differ between prosocials and proselfs and the Tertius Iungens Orientation or the employee. Prosocials seem to be driven to share knowledge by their values of equality of outcomes and their stronger need to belong to social groups. This motivation is called introjected motivation by Foss, Minbaeva, Pedersen and Reinhold (2009), or benevolent cooperation by Bridoux, Couerderoy and Durand (2011). This motivation to invest in your colleagues interests is not steered by incentives. It is therefore expected that prosocial individuals will not be influenced by rewards contingent on help seeking and help giving. Proselfs seem to be motivated by the expected utility of sharing knowledge, rather than intrinsic joy or social bounds. It is therefore expected that, when rewards comply with procedural and distributive justice standards, because

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knowledge sharing is after all difficult to measure, proselfs engage more in knowledge sharing when they perceived that it is rewarded by the organization (Bridoux et al., 2011). It is thus expected that proselfs knowledge sharing behaviors are more affected by organizational rewards than prosocials are, because their main motivation, extrinsic motivation, is strengthened by rewards.

H4a: Perceived organizational rewards for knowledge sharing and innovation involvement moderate the relationship between SVO and knowledge sharing, and especially the relation between proself orientation and knowledge sharing.

In this thesis exploratory analysis is done to identify whether the relation between Tertius Iungens Orientsation and knowledge sharing (help giving and help seeking) is also mediated by rewards contingent on knowledge sharing. From analysis of existing theory and practice, it is possible that the modertation goes in either one of two ways. (1) rewards can enhance the knowledge sharing of people who have a high TIO even more. Due to the fact that high TIO’ers have a predisposition to network, bridge gaps and create ties, they could even elicit more of this behavior when rewarded for it, because the organization shows that the thing you are good at is valued. The other possibility is that rewards can motivate people who have low TIO to share knowledge despite they do not have such a strong strategic network orientation. When networking does not come naturally for an individual, he or she has to engage in give or seek help, but can keep it purely task-driven. For example, a tax solution for an international company, listed in the AEX, but located in Russia is needed. The individual needs to know both Dutch and Russian tax-law, for which he or she needs to communicate with a Russian tax-expert (assumed he or she knows Dutch fiscal law). When the company however gives clear signals in performance meetings and rewards that help giving and seeking is a part of the job that is valued, the individual that with the low TIO can consciously enhance his or her knowledge sharing.

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H4b: Perceived organizational rewards for knowledge sharing and innovation involvement moderate the relationship between TIO and knowledge sharing.

Addition to Social Capital Theory

Social Capital Theory explains the importance of social capital by emphasizing the

importance of bridges and bonds in a network of employees as a resource for social action (Bordieu, 1989; Burt, 1992). Social Capital is a very broad concept and is often differently defined, but in a nutshell it contains that it is defined by its function to command scarce resources by the virtue of membership in networks, is does not lie in individuals but rather the relationships between individuals and it facilitates certain action of individuals who are within the structure to pursue shares objectives (Kreuter & Lezin, 2002).

The network approach does not emphasize individual traits, values and behaviors, but relational, structural and psychological dimensions (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). The

relational dimension describes the strength of the dyadic relation between the two actors, existing of the frequency of contact, the perceived trustworthiness of the other and the experience with prior exchange with that employee. The structural dimension describes the

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convenience, or inconvenience to reach to people in a network, an important variable is the accessibility of the other person whose knowledge resource has to be reached. Accessibility is not only described by geographical nearness, but also by intranet possibilities and other related aspects. The psychological dimension focuses on the image of the other person. If the other employee is found a specialist in the field, smart or experienced, than he or she is more likely to enhance the network and thus strengthens the Social Capital of the organization (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998).

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3. Methods

3.1 Sample and Data Collection

This research is conducted within a law-firm with a workforce of 250 professionals, under who lawers, solicitors and tax consultants, situated in the Netherlands. A law firm, as the one selected is a textbook example of a professional service firms, there are strongly specialized professionals and innovation is a commonly identified challenge within this industry which is the reason for selecting this company to conduct research. The aim was to collect data from around 100 employees by sending a survey, consisting of several questionnaires of the constructs of interest. In this study will be controlled for age, gender and time of employment by this firm. The survey was sent by management with the aim to increase response and there were three reminder e-mails sent to increase response. The survey was taken online and consisted of mainly likert-scale questions, but also a few open-ended ones.

Of the 321 employees that were asked to participate in this survey, 152 participated. No outliers had to be taken out due to incomplete responses or extreme deviant responses or response times. Of the participants 66 (43.4%) is male and 86 is female. The average age is 39.4 with a standard deviation of 12 years. The participants were on average 12.7 years employed in the legal profession, with a standard deviation of 10 years. The educational level is mainly a university degree (68.4%), but also higher education (12.5%), secondary

vocational education (11.8%) and high school (7.2%). Of the participants, 48.7% (75 employees) describes his or her profession as lawyer, 10.6% (16) as notary or candidate notary, 17.1% (24) as secretary of personal assistant, 6.3% as facility staff or administration, 3.3% as legal officer and 10.4% are other categories.

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35 3.2 Measurement of Construct

For the measurement of construct existing scales from previous research are mainly used, which were verified through various analyses. The complete scales can be found in appendix A)

Innovation involvement

Innovation Involvement was measured using a 9-item questionnaire, based on the scale published by Janssen (2000), which identifies idea generation, idea promotion and idea realization as components of innovation involvement. A 7-point Likert-type scale was used ranging from 1 ‘Never’ to 7 ‘Always’. An example item is “Creating new ideas for difficult issues”. All questions were translated to Dutch. The Cronbach’s alpha of the scale was .96.

Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge sharing is a construct consisting of both help giving and help seeking. This combines scale has a Crohnbachs alfa of .87.

Help-seeking was measured using a 7 item scale of Anderson and Williams (1996). This scale was revised from a he/she form into a first person format. A 7-point likert scale, ranging from 1 “completely disagree” to 7 “completely agree”. An example question is “I often ask a colleague for advice when dealing with a certain problem or situation”. All questions were translated to Dutch. The Crohnbachs alfa of the knowledge seeking scale is .84.

Help-giving was measured using a 8 item scale of Settoon and Mossholder (2002). This scale was revised from a he/she form into a first person format and only the task focused part was used of both a person-focused and task-focused scale. A 7-point likert scale, ranging from 1 “completely disagree” to 7 “completely agree”. An example question is “I take on extra

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responsibilities in order to help coworkers when things get demanding at work”. All questions were translated to Dutch. The Crohnbachs alfa of the knowledge giving scale is .86.

Social Value Orientation

Social Value Orientation was measured with the Schwartz (2006) Human Values scale, where proself orientation was measured with the achievement and power values, representing self-enhancement. Prosocial was measured with the benevolism and universalism values, representing self-transendence. Social value orientation was measured with 17 statements about persons and asked the participant of a scale from 1-6 how much that person resembles him/her. The sex of the persons in the statements was similar to the sex of the participant, to make it easier to compare and to avoid biases. An example question is: “It's very important to him to show his abilities. He wants people to admire what he does”. All questions used were from a translated, Dutch document from former research. The Crohnbachs alfa on the SVO scale is .80 for the prosocial scale and .79 for the proself scale.

Tertius Iungens Orientation

Tertius Iungens Orientation was measured with the Obstfelt (2005) scale. This scale consists of 6 questions, which could be answered on a likert scale ranging from 1 (“never”) to 7 (“allways”). An example question is: “I introduce people to each other who might have a common strategic work interest”. All questions were translated to Dutch. The Crohnbachs alfa of the scale is .95.

Organizational Rewards

Organizational rewards contingent on knowledge sharing and innovation involvement were measured with the Maurer and Tarulli (1994) scale. This scale measures the extrinsic outcome expectations, e.g. promotions and rewards. The questions were re-written to ask about

Innovation involvement due to individual orientations : the role of social value orientation and tertius Iungens orientation on innovation involvement in professional service firms