Managing innovation through leadership and culture: The mediating role of organizational commitment

Abstract

The management of innovation is essential to organizations, as they experience increasingly new demands to monitor and expand their knowledge. Managing innovation has difficulties as technology is changing at much faster pace compared to the past. Often the context of an innovation plays a greater role in a successful outcome than the merit of the underlying idea. Innovation is crucial because the competitive environment that organizations face is dynamic, developing new technology is intrinsically a long and inexact process. Whether technology development will result in success or failure, is often not known until late in the development process. Different innovation modes offer dissimilar rewards (and drawbacks) requiring up-to-date and skilled management, and an organization flexible enough to pursue different alternatives. Incorporation of innovation management construct, in the context of connecting some key factors would offer a striking contribution to understanding innovation management both theoretically, and practically. This study reconnoiters and discovers the influence of organizational leadership, culture, and commitment on managing innovation; and how innovation management recounts to business performance in the government sector, as it increasingly faces the need for innovative solutions to policy areas. The underlying justification is that encouraging firms to innovate will lead to better business performance. Therefore, this study attempts to study the direct influence of organisational culture and leadership on innovation management. This study also intends to investigate does organisational commitment mediates the influence of organisational culture and leadership on innovation management. This study intends to close the gap in the literature by proposing a conceptual framework that addresses past research in the innovation management domain in a way, which is not difficult to comprehend and implement. A research framework is developed in which the link between organizational leadership, culture, commitment and innovation management is tested. This study used a survey method to explore managing innovation in government healthcare organizations. It collected 389 samples of data from four hospitals in The United Arab Emirates (UAE). The results of this study suggest that instrumental leadership, market culture, adhocracy culture, and organizational commitment predicts innovation management. At the same time, the findings of the study indicate that organizational commitment mediates the influence of instrumental leadership, market culture and adhocracy culture on innovation management. These results of the study have implications for both theory and practice and have been discussed in details.