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

designed for knowledge and skills training to better understand each other’s personalities
and abilities, and providing engineers with the necessary resources to perform their jobs
can help generate a high relationship quality work environment. Additionally, in order to
help employees advance their social skills and develop reciprocal social relationships with
leaders and coworkers, companies can hold training events regularly to provide platforms
for interactions. Previous research finds that autonomous work environments where
employees are more likely to take charge of work activities guidance and coordination can

be beneficial to the development of high-quality TMX (Farmer et al., 2015). Accordingly,
organizations can implement procedures to enhance job autonomy within teams, thereby
improving the quality of intra-team processes and interactions.
Third, our findings also highlight that the relationship between innovation intention
and performance is strengthened when employees demonstrate a higher degree of other-
orientation. In terms of member recruitment, human resource departments can integrate
other-orientation into aptitude testing for new recruits. After becoming formal staff,

team leaders can continuingly encourage team members to pay more attention to affairs
outside of the job via corporate social responsibility events that inspire them. Furthermore,
leaders can create opportunities that support perspective taking. For example, managers
may periodically reorganize teams to revitalize the quality or frequency of interactions
among team members (Laker, Patel, Budhwar, and Malik, 2020), or facilitate interactions
between team members and the clients or end users of their work to gather interesting and
beneficial ideas (Grant and Berry, 2011).

5.3 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research

Our study has some limitations. First, although we use objective appraisal data
from team leaders, the innovation performance evaluations might be subject to single-
informant bias. A reasonable argument can be made that when a team leader rates the work
performance of team members, the ratings might be affected by employees’ tenure in the
firm, or other personal factors. Future research should seek multiple sources of data from
both customers and team coworkers to avoid this problem. Second, because our study
centers on engineers’ innovation performance in the IT service industry, the conceptual

model is based on variables at the individual level. Consequently, we may lack an overall
perspective to explain individual innovation. For example, we did not investigate the
levels of employees’ innovative self-efficacy. Indeed, researchers have suggested that
service employees likely use their self-perception of innovative self-efficacy to gauge

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