Relationship between manager innovativeness and perceived performance of scientist and engineer teams within a large aerospace organization

Organizations often strive to understand and leverage potential advantages as they seek to deliver product more plentifully, or with higher quality, or product which is uniquely attractive in some other way to their customers and users. Some of these hard-sought advantages are found in the realm of managerial styles and methods. The purpose of this research is to discover if there is a quantifiable relationship between a manager's innovativeness and the performance of his or her team. Innovative behavior is widely hailed as having an overall positive effect on the workforce, but there is little rigorous research attempting to specifically isolate and identify the effects of manager innovativeness.; A population of 354 engineers, scientists, and managers was studied. The subjects were employees working on 50 different teams in 4 different geographical locations of the same firm. The study participants voluntarily completed an anonymous survey instrument designed to characterize both the performance of their team and the innovativeness of their manager. The survey instrument also gathered demographic data on each subject. The performance data was compared to the innovativeness data on a team-by-team basis in order to look for a relationship.; The principle findings demonstrate there is a direct relationship of moderate strength between a manager's tendency to innovate and the performance of the team. The higher the perceived innovativeness of the manager, the higher the perceived team performance tended to be. The analysis yielded several ancillary findings as well, including a significant level of agreement between manager assessments and team member assessments on the innovativeness of the manager.