Creative Bootlegging as a Catalyst Between Job Design (Mis)fit and Innovative Work Behavior

Previous meta-analytic evidence has shown several job-design characteristics to be crucial predictors of employee innovativeness. The reality is, however, that many individuals are likely to be in misfit with the experienced characteristics of their jobs. Discrepancy in job-design characteristics (actual versus wanted) has (paradoxically) the potential to explain employee innovative work behavior. In particular, we focused on task identity and entertain the possibility that employee engagement in creative bootlegging interacts with incongruent situations between actual- and wanted-task identity, thereby increasing their creative and innovative performance. The results of moderated polynomial regression analyses from the multisource field study of 233 working professionals and 62 direct supervisors employed by a European bank suggest several interesting findings. First, congruence in actual–wanted task identity at high levels (a high-fit situation) leads to higher levels of innovative work behavior than congruence achieved at low levels (a low-fit situation). Second, we found empirical evidence that task–identity incongruence is driving innovative work behaviors more than congruence does. Finally, incongruence in actual–wanted task identity interacts with creative bootlegging in positively predicting innovative work behavior when employees self-report higher levels of underground innovation activities.