RSM research about management innovation wins EURAM Award in France

In this study, researchers Kevin Heij and Henk Volberda examined how innovative ways of managing and organising contribute to a firm’s innovation performance. For example how new organisational structures, decentralisation of decision-making, new rewards systems, new communication plans, new managerial practices concerning control and monitoring make up the management innovation ‘self-managed teams’, and contribute to a firm’s innovation performance.

Organisational size

Heij and Volberda shed a new light on how organisational size – based on the number of employees – influences this relationship. Based on a large scale survey among 10,000 Dutch organisations, the researchers found that management innovation has an increasingly positive effect on a firm’s innovation performance. However, the larger a firm, the more it has to overcome reduced levels of innovation performance before complementary effects among higher levels of new management practices pay off.

Innovation performance

The jury selected this paper for the EURAM Award because of its original approach to look at management innovation based on complementary effects among new management practices. In addition, the jury appreciated Heij’s and Volberda’s approach to go beyond the often usual linear effects by applying large-scale survey research. The jury was also impressed by the researchers’ contribution to look at the moderating effect of organisational size in the relationship between management innovation and innovation performance instead of considering it as an antecedent.