An Empirical Study On The Innovative Performance Of The Knowledge Employees In The Sci-Tech Organizations Context

Nowadays, China is engaged in being an innovative country, which highlights the necessaries and significance of research on innovation performance of knowledge workers. Knowledge workers, or "the creative class", are viewed as core to the competitiveness of a firm in a knowledge-based economy. During modern creative activities, knowledge workers, the main actors of innovation, dissemination and application of knowledge, are the vital source of renewing products, services and creative processes in an organization. A basic task of human resource management is to enhance innovative performance of these knowledge groups of individuals and then to strengthen the whole organization’s innovation capacity and increase market competition advantages.This paper integrates the two aspects of individuals and organization’s factors that both play an important role in individual innovative performance, into a multilevel theoretical framework to examine how does the organizational environment adjust the individual innovation, with the aim of providing practical suggestion on improving knowledge workers’creativity.At the individual level, this paper adopts the achievement motivation theory as the core theory. Achievement motivation theory describes goal orientations as motivational orientations that capture how individuals regulate attention and effort when approaching, interpreting, and responding to achievement situations. Divided into two dimensions, goal orientation is represented as learning-prove and performance-prove by following realization of goals. Individuals who are learning-prove goal orientation would learn actively aiming at enhancing working ability, widening work horizon and acquiring new technology and creative ways. Knowledge workers also confront external factors in achievement settings, such as peer competition, rewarding, self-respect, pressure from task and avoiding criticism, those of which mainly come from job performance, which is called Performance-prove Goal Orientation.At the organization level, organizational institution and organizational environment are the main research issues. The organizational institution is divided into three divisions:regulatory, cognitive and normative. Organizational environment refers to external environment in which individuals engaged in innovation activities, including Social-organizational Work Environment and Physical Work Environment. Social-organizational Work Environment stresses a series of working motivators and hygiene factors, such as encouraging innovation activities, supporting discussion concerning exchanging new ideas, setting up performance evaluation system, rewards and incentives for creative ideas or results. Correspondingly, Physical Work Environment implies physical factors connected with working, such as office layout, interior decoration, indoor plants/flowers, private and open spaces.According to achievement motivation theory, this paper presents a conceptual model of moderated effects of organizational institution and environment on creative performance on the basis of interactions between goal orientation and innovation performance, with regard to the relationship between organizational environment and individual innovation performance. The empirical analysis result shows that the goal orientation has direct influences on the individual creative performance. The organizational institution and environment not only have the direct influences on the individual creative performance, but also moderate the relations between the goal orientation and individual creative performance.Restricted to the author’s academic level, this has some limitations. Knowledge workers are widely spread over varieties of industries and companies, so we could conclude with the limited samples that this study could only be applied into some scientific companies, research institutes as well as college schools. Accordingly, more research samples are needed with enhancing sample size and widening samples so that the empirical results could have the stronger research significance. In this way, our findings could be replicated in other organizations and job categories.