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NTU Management Review Vol. 33 No. 2 Aug. 2023

month later, we asked respondents to the Phase 1 survey to evaluate innovation intention
and the moderator. The Phase 3 survey took place two weeks after the Phase 2 survey, and
asked team supervisors to rate each team member’s service innovation performance.
To mitigate the risk of social desirability bias, each participant was provided with a
questionnaire and a return envelope. We made it clear that all completed questionnaires
should be sealed in the envelopes before being placed in a designated collection box to
ensure confidentiality. As an incentive to participate, a gift worth NTD 300 was offered to

those who completed both questionnaires. Of the 403 employees and 13 supervisors who
responded to our surveys, we excluded 121 engineers’ responses due to incomplete data or
because their tenure at their current firms was six months or less.
Our methodology resulted in a data set consisting of 282 individually matched pairs
of engineer-leader dyads. Of this population, 53% were male, and 41% had earned at least
one bachelor’s degree. The average company tenure of the respondents was 3.88 years
(standard deviation [SD] = 3.25), while the average industrial tenure was 5.53 years (SD =

4.41).

3.2 Measures
The surveys in this study utilized Likert scales ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”)
to 7 (“strongly agree”) for all variables. We adopted both translation and back-translation
procedures, and translated all English items into Chinese (Brislin, 1986) since we
administrated the survey in Taiwan. Table 1 presents a full list of measurement items.
Employees’ innovation performance was evaluated by their direct managers or
department supervisors. Innovation performance was rated based on the overall innovative

behavior that employees search techniques and process to generate and implement new
ideas. To measure employees’ willingness of adopting innovative behavior, we used
the three items from the scale of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Perugini and
Bagozzi, 2001). We used the three-item value congruence scale developed by Hoffman
et al. (2011) to measure the extent employees perceived alignment between their values
and those of their team members. Consistent with Fuller et al. (2006), we utilized a felt
obligation scale to reflect employees’ desire to repay their team by adopting behaviors

designed to improve customer service and innovation. Nonetheless, the scale developed
by Fuller et al. (2006) reflects employees’ felt obligation to repay their companies through
general positive organizational behavior, whereas our employed three-item scale reflects
the extent to which employees felt obligated to repay their teams by using flexible and

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