Job design and innovative work behavior enabling innovation through active or low-strain jobs?

Promoting the innovative potential of employees is a main challenge for HR professionals. Previous studies already stressed the role of job design for employee innovativeness. Building on the work of Karasek & Theorell (1990), we focus on the relation between job design, work engagement and innovative work behaviour (IWB). The results show that job control is positively related to both IWB and work engagement, job demands are negatively related to work engagement, yet their relation to IWB is more ambiguous. Significant interaction effects between job demands and job control variables in both the relation with work engagement and IWB are found, yet their nature differs significantly. We find that active jobs (high control and high demands) are related to lower levels of IWB in comparison to low-strain jobs (high control, low demands), which has major managerial consequences.