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Service Innovation in the IT Service Industry: Social Influence and Relationship Exchange Perspectives

systems, strategy, and organization management (Liu, Jiang, Shalley, Keem, and Zhou,
2016; Lusch and Nambisan, 2015). More importantly, individual innovative behavior as a
significant momentum for firm innovation has gradually gained attention and discussion in
both academic and practical fields. Innovative behavior refers to an employee’s intention
to introduce or apply novel ideas, products, processes, or measures to his or her work role,
team, or company (Scott and Bruce, 1994; Yuan and Woodman, 2010). Prior studies (e.g.,
Farmer, Tierney, and Kung-Mcintyre, 2003; Kör et al., 2021; Scott and Bruce, 1994; Yuan

and Woodman, 2010) highlight the significance of new ideas and employees who, solely
or collectively, generate, promote, discuss, revise and implement these ideas. As such,
innovative behavior can be viewed as the heart of all organizational innovation (Kör et
al., 2021; Scott and Bruce, 1994). Innovative behavior at the workplace is an important
element that drives competitive advantages, and provides companies with a foundation
for maintaining or strengthening high performance (Ng and Wang, 2019; Scott and Bruce,
1994; Yuan and Woodman, 2010).

Besides, several studies have used creativity and innovative behavior interchangeably
when investigating innovation-related behaviors (Yuan and Woodman, 2010; Zhou,
2003). However, by definition, creativity differs from innovation because the former
refers to individual idea generation, whereas the latter involves idea generation and
implementation across the organization (Zhou, 2003); that is, creative behavior can be
viewed as a vital component of innovative behavior or subsumed under the outcomes of
innovation performance (Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, and Staw, 2005; Yuan and Woodman,
2010). Appendix Table A1 summarizes findings from several major empirical studies on
individual innovative behavior.

There are two main streams of research that explore the mediating mechanism
underlying the link from antecedents to individual innovative behavior. First, some
literature has observed employee innovation performance from the view of social cognitive
theory (Farmer et al., 2003; Gong et al., 2009; Liao et al., 2010; Zhang and Zhou, 2014).
These studies argue that individual innovation can be affected by the belief that one
possesses required knowledge and skills to produce novel ideas. Specifically, according to
the self-efficacy theory, individual efficacy beliefs can be nourished by enactive mastery

experience and mastery modeling (Bandura, 1997). Hence, prior studies have investigated
the impact of leadership and the relationship quality among members (i.e., coworkers and
leaders) on employees’ self-cognition. For example, high TMX, representing situations
where team members tend to provide support and assistance to each other, can be

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