Exploring the effects of knowledge characteristic and self-efficacy on employees' innovative behaviors: The moderating effect of environmental uncertainty

Along with global marketing competition and shortened product life cycle, many firms attempt to engage in product innovation in order to create new products for sustaining their competitive advantage. Prior studies have indicated that firms' successful product innovation are intimately linked with employees' innovative behavior. Furthermore, some previous studies also indicate that knowledge characteristic and self efficacy are important factors to improve organizational development; however, few studies investigate the relationship among knowledge characteristic, self-efficacy, and employees' innovation behavior. Therefore, we attempt to explore these relationships in this study. On the other hand, environmental uncertainty is a key influencing factor in the competitive environment, especially for knowledge intensive manufacturing industry. However, few studies explore the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty among knowledge characteristic, self-efficacy, and employees' innovation behavior in manufacturing industry. Therefore, we address the research gap by investigating sales and R&D employees in manufacturing industry. Our results show that knowledge characteristic has positive effect on employees' innovative behavior for the R&D employees. Furthermore, self-efficacy has positive effect on employees' innovative behavior for both sales and R&D employees. Finally, environmental uncertainty has positive moderate effect on the relationship among knowledge characteristic, self-efficacy, and employees' innovation behavior.