| dc.description.abstract | Employees play a crucial role in attaining innovation making them most vulnerable to its complex and uncertain nature. Consequently, employees must deal with either clear or conflicting roles resulting from rapidly evolving roles and poorly defined job descriptions. Since studies exploring the impact of these role characteristics on employee innovative work behaviour (IWB) are still scarce, this study aims to investigate the direct and indirect impact of role clarity and role conflict on employee IWB through innovation climate. We test the hypothesis by using cross-sectional design utilizing three datasets collected from a large sample representing the Norwegian working population. These data were taken at three different time intervals from September 2021 (T1=1,511), March 2022 (T2=1,527) and September 2022 (T3=1,531) which was a period of uncertainty and instability. T1 was gathered during the COVID-19 lockdown, while T2 and T3 were collected after the lockdown restrictions were lifted. The results showed consistent findings across three samples. The findings revealed that role clarity significantly influences innovation climate; however, it does not directly foster employee IWB. Role conflict was found to have a dual effect − simultaneously improving employee IWB while negatively impacting innovation climate. The mediation results demonstrated that innovation climate enhances the effect of role clarity and suppresses the positive impact of role conflict on employee IWB. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. | |
