Title: Power distance: a deterrent or a facilitator for innovation

Authors: Sayan Banerjee; Dinesh K. Srivastava

Addresses: National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), PGP Hostel 1 and 2, Room No. 128, Vihar Lake, Mumbai, 400 087, India. ' National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Vihar Lake, Mumbai, 400 087, India

Abstract: The purpose of this research is to understand innovation and its relationship with its various correlates. Since it is difficult to measure innovation, hence, a measure of entrepreneurial strategy and organisational innovation devised by Miller and Friesen (1982) was used to do this work. In this work, I have tried to understand innovation by relating it to other variables like organisational structures, environmental uncertainty, etc. Though some work was done correlating innovation and entrepreneurial strategy, yet nothing much was done on the aspect of structural and cultural factors leading to innovation. In this work, some relationships from the literature have been analysed, keeping the aspect of power distance in mind. While examining innovation with regard to factors like organisational structures and environmental uncertainty, another variable known as innovation norm, was also taken into account. Implications can be discussed for the integration of this variables-innovation norms and power distance to extend theories of innovation and corporate entrepreneurship.

Keywords: organisational structure; environmental uncertainty; organisational innovation; power distance; entrepreneurial strategy; corporate entrepreneurship.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBEX.2012.049541

International Journal of Business Excellence, 2012 Vol.5 No.6, pp.677 - 705

Published online: 31 Jul 2014 *

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