Qi, Zixuan; (2025) Entrepreneurial Tendencies and Workplace Innovation: The Influence of Context. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Innovation is crucial for organizations as it drives competitiveness, fosters adaptability in dynamic markets, and fuels long-term growth and success (Aggarwal et al., 2024; Khyareh & Rostami, 2022). Thus, understanding how individuals generate innovation in the workplace is a topic of significance, with both academic and practical implications. Individual-level research has focused on personal characteristics pertinent to either idea generation/creativity or idea implementation/innovation (Anderson et al., 2014). Whereas a variety of perspectives have emerged, the interactionist perspective has established itself in the creativity and innovation literature as one of the most prominent frameworks for understanding how personal attributes interact with contexts to affect one’s creativity and innovation (e.g. Woodman et al., 1993). Nevertheless, how contexts affect the expression of different personality traits regarding the two distinct innovation phases, idea generation and idea implementation, is still poorly understood. To address this gap, this thesis integrates creativity and innovation theories (e.g., Woodman et al., 1993) with the entrepreneurial tendencies’ theory (Ahmetoglu et al., 2011; Ahmetoglu & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2017), and trait activation theory (Tett & Burnett, 2003; Tett et al., 2021) to understand how entrepreneurial tendencies promote ideation and idea implementation activities, and how these traits affect individual-level innovation outcomes in different organizational contexts. Specifically, this thesis looks at how entrepreneurial tendencies promote ideation and idea implementation activities, and how these traits affect individual innovation outcomes in different organizational contexts. In line with previous literature, some traits are more pertinent to ideation some are more associated with idea implementation. Moreover, work context moderates the expression of some entrepreneurial tendencies but not others, affecting its impact on individual innovation outcomes over time. In the same vein, the predictive power of entrepreneurial tendencies on individual innovation outcomes is partially context-dependent (Chapters 3 and 4). This thesis also makes a methodological contribution to the personality literature and innovation literature by developing and validating a refined measure of entrepreneurial tendencies (META Facet) comprised of 10 facets (Chapter 2). Collectively, this research offers a novel perspective on the influence of personality traits on workplace innovation, deepening our understanding of how entrepreneurial tendencies drive workplace innovation across diverse organizational contexts.

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