Personal Values and Innovativeness Across Cultures

Introduction

Modern enterprises continually care for innovation of their work and behavior through realization of the technological and particularly the non-technological innovations (Chesbrough, 2009; Lafley & Johnson, 2010; Leiponen & Helfat, 2010; Chesbrough, 2017; Brunswicker & Chesbrough, 2018). Development of innovations is determined with plethora of preconditions, capabilities and other external and internal factors (Rogers, 2003; Daghfous, 2007; Afuah, 2014; Limaj & Bernroider, 2017; Mirvis & Googins, 2018). Management authors reported that subjective – especially behavior-related – factors shape the use of available resources and capacities for innovations (Chesbrough, 2009; Tidd & Bessant, 2009; Mullins, 2010; Limaj & Bernroider, 2017) and exposed the importance of personal and organizational values for development of innovations in enterprises (Munson & Posner, 1979; Skarzynski & Gibson, 2008; Pyka & Scharnhorst, 2009; Uy et al., 2015). Thus, studies of values, planned behavior and innovation theory revealed significant and positive correlations between behavior and specific behavior factors on one hand and innovations on the other hand (Miron et al., 2004; Mahr et al., 2014).

Management literature still offers limited evidences about detailed relations between personal values of employees and development of innovations (Ralston et al., 2011; Camelo-Ordaz et al., 2012; Mahr et al., 2014): (a) How individual personal values influence innovations; (b) Which personal values predominantly influence innovation processes; (c) How single personal and organizational factors determine the importance of individual personal values for innovations; and (d) How individual personal values influence innovations in different enterprises. We continue these studies with consideration of the stream of employees’ personal values, which have the leading influences on innovations, and comparison of these leading personal values of employees between various enterprises.

In the management literature one knows various researches of managers’ values (England, 1967; Posner & Schmidt, 1984; Ralston et al., 2011). Single authors researched, primarily by comparing, the managers’ values systems on the level of organizations in a selected country (Posner & Schmidt, 1984). Others were comparing single groups of values between the most advanced, the most influential and/or the biggest countries of the world, e.g. USA, China, Japan, or Germany (Bigoness & Blakely, 1996; Elenkov, 1997; Ralston et al., 1997; Westwood & Posner, 1997; Kuchinke, 1999; Ralston et al., 2006). Less researches covered bigger international samples that included differently developed countries or countries working in different conditions (Egri et al., 2000; Smith et al., 2002; Reynaud et al., 2007). Single researches and their results are additionally rather complex to compare due to application of different methodological starting points and due to consideration of values on different levels of working, i.e. the levels of society, organization, group, or individual (Yammarino et al., 2005).