An empirical study on the organizational trust, employee-organization relationship and innovative behavior from the integrated perspective of social exchange and organizational sustainability

Abstract

Combining social exchange and inducement-contribution theory as our overarching theoretical framework, we examine innovative climate as a boundary condition and organizational trust as a mediating mechanism to explain when and how the employee-organization relationship (EOR) is associated with workplace innovative behavior. We conducted a field study using multi-source data to test our hypotheses. The results indicated that creativity positively predicted innovative behavior through organizational trust, and an innovative climate moderated the indirect effect of EOR on innovative behavior via organizational trust. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.