Job Design and Innovative Work Behavior: One Size Does Not Fit All Types of Employees

As innovative employees become imperative for an organizations’ success, research identifed job design as a crucial variable in promoting innovative work behavior (IWB) (Hammond et al., 2011). Using the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model of Bakker & Demerout (2007), this artcle contributes to the literature as it uses recent insights on the distncton between job challenges and job hindrances (Van den Broeck et al., 2010) and distnguishes between blue- and white-collar employees. Using survey data of 893 employees of various organizations the findings generally confrim the JD-R model, although important differences were found between blue-collar and white-collar employees regarding the relation of organizing and routine tasks with IWB. Job content insecurity further was found to be very detrimental for blue-collar IWB. These findings have important HR and politcal implications as they show that there is no ‘one size fts all’ HR solution for innovation.