The Impact of Interorganizational Manpower Flows on the Innovation Process

In a study of 56 food processing firms, respondents reported on manpower flows that had an important influence on innovation decision making. Positive gain manpower flows appear to be a relatively rare occurrence. Only 23 (41%) of these 56 firms report any significant, innovation-impact, personnel additions, and 15 of these involve management positions. Four propositions were tested that focus on the relationship between manpower flows and innovative outcomes of an organization, i.e., offering new products and incorporating new processes. Moderate support was found for the proposition that net gain manpower flows are more likely to be related to radical as opposed to incremental process adoption. Evidence suggests that there is an inverted “u” shaped relationship between, net manpower flows and innovation outcomes. New blood stimulates innovation up to a point after which there is disruption to the innovation process. Adding too many people at once who all have a significant influence on the process may be unwise.

The impact of manpower flows on innovative outcomes appears to be moderated by organization structure and the availability of slack resources for innovating. In particular, net manpower flows were significantly more likely to be positively correlated with the sum of the staged adoption behaviors for the retort pouch in decentralized (p ≤ 0.05) and complex (p < 0.01) organizations. This and other evidence suggest that structural autonomy and new job titles with substantial visibility in the firm can go far to accommodate newcomers and capture the innovative benefits of their arrival. The availability of slack resources strengthens the relationship between the adoption of the retort pouch and net manpower flows although the effects were not as strong (p < 0.10) as for the structural moderators. This supports the common sense notion that newcomers who have had a significant effect on innovative decision making will see these decisions implemented in organizations that allocate resources to innovating.