Work Stressors and Emotional Intelligence on Bootlegging Innovation: Explorative Evidence of Value Creation From the China Context

Despite interest burgeoning in the effects of employee job performance on firm value creation, far less attention is given to the triggers and influential factors of employee innovative behaviors. As a proactive behavior, bootlegging innovation grants individual employees greater freedom to explore new knowledge and opportunities to try their own ideas, and such advantage is an exceptional personal skill that is likely to create significant organizational value. This article intends to unpack how work stressors and emotional intelligence (EI) influence employees' bootlegging innovation, which is defined as a voluntary behavior that bypasses the official channels and has no formal authorization. Drawing on cognitive transactional theory and the job demand-control model, we employed a dataset of 482 knowledge employees in China to investigate the effects of challenge stressors (CS) and hindrance stressors (HS) on employees' two stages of bootlegging innovation (i.e., underground innovation and creative deviance). The empirical findings suggest that CS are positively correlated with bootlegging innovation, whereas HS negatively affect bootlegging innovation. Meanwhile, we found that EI significantly strengthens the above relationships. These insights lead to theoretical and practical advances for the micromanagement scholarship by cracking the motivations of employees' bootlegging innovation while guiding managers to allocate work assignments and effectively cultivate an innovative workforce.