Improving Management Practices, Work Engagement and Workplace Innovation for Productivity and Wellbeing, 1999–2022

Transforming productivity and growth are central concerns of governments and other stakeholders in the advanced nations. Supporting employees to innovate is a key theme in discussions of the role of the workplace in improving productivity, articulated in the UK Government Industrial Strategy (HM Government 2017) and as a theme for researchers exploring performance-enhancing HR strategies (Shipton 2017) and workplace innovation practices (Findlay et al. 2016a). Choices around management practices are central to how employees’ experience work; and this research proposes that the interaction of workplace and job design practices create or limit innovative work climates that in turn impact on employees’ engagement and capacity to innovate, a core driver of productivity improvement. This research centres on the need to better theorise, understand and measure how workplace practices are selected and shape employee responses (behaviours and attitudes), and how these deliver outcomes of value to businesses, employees and society. Better conceptual framing, analysis and evidence are crucial to influencing business and to designing interventions that support the adoption of better business practices and improved innovation outcomes. The core research thesis is that business characteristics and management practices associated with workplace innovation – such as decentralised organisational structures, wider information sharing, supporting enterprising behaviours, and HR practices that reward creativity and bounded risk-taking – can help develop resource-rich jobs and innovative work climates associated with higher work engagement and innovative work behaviours. The research adopts an innovative, multi-disciplinary approach to exploring the relationships between (a) factors shaping management support for workplace practices that contribute to an innovative work climate, (b) workplace practices and job design features (job demands and resources) that enable or constrain employee innovation, (c) employees’ work engagement, and (d) employee wellbeing, innovative work behaviours and employee-driven innovation outcomes that enhance productivity. The dataset contains survey data collected from 3665 employees and managers in 30 medium or large-sized businesses in the UK, 126 transcripts from interviews with members of senior management (CEO, HR Director, Operations Director) and productivity data from each business covering the period 2016-2021. Data was collected between 2019 and 2022 although case studies were generally completed within a few months.