The Relationship Between Perceived Supervisory Support And Innovation Behavior Of Service Workers

Innovation is the core driving force for enterprises to survive and develop. Employees, those who are both creative and willing to practise innovative behavior, constitute and reflect the organizational innovation capability. The researches into the employees’ innovation have attracted widespread attention of scholars, producing fruitful research results, especially in the new era of psychological behaviorism constituting paradigm shifts in management science (Hopp,2004). However, the existing studies focused more attention on the innovation of R&D workers and entrepreneurs, ignoring innovation of ordinary employees of service firms. For service businesses, the service contact between employees and customers, the synchronization of service production and service consumption, customer participation, and the high degree of empowerment give special emphasis on employees’innovation. Based on the knowledge that innovation of a service firm is mainly manifested in the innovation of service employees, the purpose of this paper is to do research on perceived supervisor support and innovation of the service industry is of great theoretical and practical significance.In this paper, we did a survey among the staff of domestic service companies mainly from the city of Chengdu, Dongguan and Beijing, involving companies of banking, securities, insurance, real estate, tourism and so on, with105valid questionnaires returned. After a series of statistical analysis on the collected data, we draw the following findings:1. In the analysis of demographic variables, we found that length of service and length of time with supervisor has an impact on PSS and innovation. However, other factors such as age, education and gender length of service have no impact on PSS or innovation2. Results show that PSS is significantly and positively correlated with innovation. Specially, the dimensions of identifying value and caring about well-beings have a direct impact on innovation. The contribution of this study mainly includes the following aspects:1. Built a model to research the relationship between PSS and innovation both as a whole and their various dimensions based on the service business.2. Did empirical analysis of the relationship between PSS and innovation, and had most of the hypothesises supported.3. Provided advice for follow-up study to grant improvements based on shortcomings of this study.