The Impact of Organisational Support and Individual Achievement Orientation on Creative Deviance

Abstract

Innovation-oriented firms encourage their staff to generate ideas, but lack the resources to sponsor them all. Entrepreneurially minded employees may respond to this discrepancy with creative deviance, i.e., pursue ideas despite managerial orders to stop. We elucidate this understudied flipside of corporate entrepreneurship by theorising and testing organisational and individual antecedents to creative deviance. Strain theory leads us to hypothesise that organisational support for innovation reduces creative deviance. Based on achievement goal theory, we conjecture that mastery goals foster creative deviance. These predictors are expected to interact in their impact on creative deviance. Data from 659 employees support our hypotheses. Our study contributes to corporate entrepreneurship theory by expounding an important, but so far understudied form of innovative behaviour, extends strain theory by showing how individual traits can reinforce or mitigate the structural strain created by organisations, and advances research on achievement goals by connecting mastery achievement orientation to deviant behaviour. In terms of practical implications, our study indicates how leaders may promote compliant innovation through organisational support and how they can increase person-job fit by screening candidates’ achievement goals during recruitment.