Mobile Working Stress and Employee Innovative behavior: Exploring the Role of Organizational Conflict and Work Engagement

New product development requires employees to display creativity and innovation and with virtualization of organizational life, they have to work apart from their peers while there remains a need for collaboration. At the same time virtual working environments create different types of conflicts and mobile-working-related stress might impact their ability to display the expected innovativeness. This study is aimed at exploring the impact of conflict, stress emerging from virtual working environments and work engagement on employee innovative behaviors. We obtained a sample of 100 employees in product development in financial technology companies in Indonesia, that have counterparts working in other Asian countries. The results show that mobile workplace stress creates an adverse impact on employee innovative behavior and work engagement, while it positively effects organizational conflict. Intrapersonal and intragroup conflicts contribute to the emergence of organizational conflict, and leads to a negative association with employee innovative behavior. On the other hand, intergroup conflict has a negative impact on organizational conflict, and positively drives employee innovative behavior. Work engagement, however, serves as a suppressing factor on the relations between mobile workplace stress and employee innovative behavior. For practitioners, this study shows that it is inevitable to manage intergroup conflict to drive employee innovative behaviors and to continuously promote work engagement in order to reduce the impact of mobile workplace stress and conflict on innovative behaviors amongst employees.