Jong & Hartog - article review - Essay Example

The importance of innovation is further seen in the amount of research geared towards understanding how it can be encouraged and cultivated among organizational people. Some of these researches have looked at innovation in terms of a personality characteristic, while others examine it as a behavioral characteristic. The article under review has adopted the latter view. It looks at innovation as a behavioral aspect that can suffer or benefit from the manager’s involvement. In this case, the study looks at the positive aspect where interest is on what the managers can do to influence individual innovation.

The study considers this as an extension of existent studies which have demonstrated that employees’ innovative behavior is largely reliant on employee interaction in the workplace (Jong & Hartog .p.42). The future of organizations lie in the ability of leaders to coordinate and integrate their employees differing styles via a process of applied creativity that comprises defining novel problems, coming up with solutions to these problems and employing these solutions. This demonstrates the importance of leaders in prompting individual innovation, however, irrespective of this acknowledgment little research exists on the role of leadership in spurring employee innovation.

It is the void resulting from this inadequacy that the present article seeks to address. The aim is to provide insight into the role of leaders in individual innovation. To create an objective study the article thoroughly examines the two main concepts, innovation and leadership. The researchers look at innovation as a process made up of two main phases, initiation and implementation. As a two staged process, the first step concludes with the production of an idea and the second stage concludes as soon as the idea is implemented (Jong & Hartog .p.43).

This approach contributes to the adopted definition which considers innovative behavior as a multi-faceted, overriding construct that represents all behaviors through which employees can contribute to the innovation process. The concern of the paper is idea generation and application behavior. In regard to leadership, the article considers leadership as the process of influencing others towards achieving some kind of desired outcome. The article mainly relies on the behavioral perspective of leadership as this will help in addressing how leader behavior influences employees’ idea generation and application behavior (Jong & Hartog .p.43).

The next step is establishing a connection between leadership and individual innovation. This is enabled by looking at theory-based leadership styles. The theory-based leadership styles were originally developed for variant purposes such as the assessment of leaders’ impact on performance or effectiveness as opposed to innovation-related outcomes. Looking at the adopted approach it is possible to identify that the study dwells on the subject of leadership in relation to innovation. In this case, innovation is the dependent factor as it is influenced by the leadership approach.

What is the paradigm? A research paradigm is a perspective about research held by a community of researchers that is based on a set of shared assumptions, concepts, values, and practices (Johnson and Christensen, 2012.p.31). More simply, it is an