Organisation level drivers that promote innovative work behaviour in healthcare delivery: a micro-level perspective

Healthcare has been largely acknowledged as a knowledge-intensive industry. Consequently, healthcare professionals are increasingly pushed to exploit their current knowledge and to develop new knowledge to continuously improve healthcare delivery. Despite this relevance, operations executives of healthcare organizations are experiencing difficulties in leveraging knowledge assets to effectively promote innovative work behaviour. Past research supports the idea that knowledge assets can produce significant changes once they are able to modify knowledge-related behaviours at the individual level, and in particular to facilitate knowledge sharing. While previous contributions have already investigated the antecedents of employees’ knowledge sharing behaviour in the OM context, the way in which knowledge assets and knowledge sharing affect individual innovative work behaviour has remained largely unexplored. The objective of our study is to narrow this gap. To this end, two main research questions are addressed. Which are the main drivers that promote knowledge sharing among health professionals and innovative behaviour in current practice? Should hospital managers leverage on these factors to promote innovative behaviour and thus continuous improvement?