Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Nowadays, work organizations recognize that their competitiveness and survival depend on their ability to respond to changes, both within organizations and in their environment (including customers, clients, and competing organizations). In order to react to such changes appropriately, innovative products and processes are required to enhance internal processes and outcomes and, subsequently, to maintain prosperous relationships with customers and clients (Anderson et al. , 2014; West and Farr, 1989). This also applies to educational organizations such as vocational colleges, which are confronted with a strong need for innovations that emanates from intensive relationships with companies and the labor market. Therefore, in vocational colleges innovations are required which enable an adequate job preparation of students, for instance, by providing work-oriented classes and establishing collaborations with other schools and companies (Messmann and Mulder, 2011, 2014).
Given the pivotal role of innovations, organizations need their employees to actively contribute to innovation processes. Employees' contributions to innovation development, which are an essential basis for the development of innovations, are referred to as innovative work behavior (IWB). IWB includes the exploration of opportunities for innovation as well as the generation, promotion, and realization of innovative ideas in organizational practice (De Jong, 2007; Janssen, 2000; Messmann and Mulder, 2012). In contrast to jobs which are deliberately centered on creative and innovative work (e.g. R&D jobs), in most work contexts IWB is a proactive, extra-role effort that may be part of informal job expectations toward employees but that is not part of their formal job description (i.e. tasks, responsibilities, and obligations). In the work context of vocational teachers, expectations to contribute to innovation development may vary from school to school, depending on the school management and its particular attitude toward innovation. Also, contributions to innovation development may be expected more explicitly from teachers who belong to school management or to an innovation team which is responsible for developing innovative products and processes at school.
Obviously, this extra-role nature of IWB implies that employees' involvement in innovation processes creates additional job demands that may lead to feelings of overload. However, these additional demands may also lead to increased work motivation. In this regard, the job demands-resources (JD-R) model (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007; Demerouti and Bakker, 2011) suggests that whether job demands are...