Promoting innovation: A change study

This paper considers how employee innovation develops during the course of introducing team‐working for production‐related staff. Longitudinal analysis revealed that different predictors were active at different phases. At first, changes in idea implementation were related to changes in management support. Subsequently, changes in suggestion making were associated with changes in job control and changes in idea implementation were linked to changes in team support for innovation. Results are consistent with the developmental notion that, whilst external support is an important predictor of innovation initially, structural job changes and local regulation are more important later.