BUS603: Managing People

We followed the back-translation procedure proposed by Brislin to translate the English version measurement instruments into Chinese. Specifically, these measurements were first translated from English into Chinese by a vice professor of organizational behavior and then back-translated from Chinese into English by another professor of organizational behavior. Finally, a bilingual management scholar translated the second English version into Chinese.

Employee-Organization relationship. We adapted the eight-item scale originally developed by Shore to measure EOR. Responses ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). A sample item was "My organization has made a significant investment in me". The Cronbach's alpha of this scale was 0.702.

Organizational trust. A seven-item scale developed by Gabarro and Athos was used to measure organizational trust. Employees ranked statements ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). A sample item was "I believe my employer has high integrity". The Cronbach's alpha coefficient of organizational trust in this study was 0.824.

Innovative climate. We used an eight-item scale developed by Siegel and Kaemmerer to measure innovative climate. The scale measured the degree to which an employee perceived the organizational innovative climate. Responses were self-rated from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) according to the statements. A sample item was "Creativity is encouraged here". Cronbach's alpha of this scale was 0.797.

Innovative behavior. A six-item scale originally developed by Scott and Bruce was used to measure innovative behavior. A sample item was "Develops adequate plans and schedules for the implementation of new ideas". Supervisors rated employee's innovative behavior from 1 (never behaves this way) to 5 (often behaves this way). Cronbach's alpha of this scale was 0.861.

Control variables. The present studies suggested that employee demographics (e.g., age, gender, organizational tenure, and education) were likely to be related to employee innovative behavior. Therefore, we controlled for these variables to rule out alternative effects on innovative behavior. Individual age, organizational tenure, and years of education were self-reported in years. Gender was coded as 0 and 1 for male and females, respectively.