School support for teacher innovation: The role of basic psychological need satisfaction

Innovation is a core factor that determines the success of organizations in the 21st century. How individual innovation can be effectively facilitated is, consequently, an increasingly important topic. Conservation of resources theory depicts how supportive resources can relate to positive employee feelings and behaviors, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Organizational support theorists hold an instrumental view on the motivational mechanisms of innovation, while self-determination theory (SDT) suggests that innovation is more likely to be promoted intrinsically. Teacher innovation is critical in the current educational reform, and its motivational mechanisms may differ, given teachers’ deep emotional connection with students. Drawing from SDT and using data from a survey of 1,115 primary and high school teachers in China, this study explored the relationship among school support, basic psychological needs, and teacher innovation, and further investigated the relationships among the needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness in facilitating teacher innovation. Results showed that need satisfaction is a useful theoretical mechanism to explain how teacher innovation is motivated, and that the effects of different needs vary. Relatedness had the greatest mpact on teacher innovation and was the antecedent of competence, while autonomy showed nonsignificant relationships with other variables. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.