THE INFLUENCE OF TEMPORARY WORKERS ON ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATIVENESS

Empirical research about the positive and negative influences of temporary workers on organizational innovativeness. The results indicate that temporary workers influence organizational innovativeness through their impact on knowledge creation and learning in a workgroup. More specifically: temporary workers bring in extra external knowledge in the workgroup which improves knowledge combination. Furthermore, temporary workers enhance the substantive and affective conflict level in a workgroup. While the latter is negative for knowledge sharing, the former facilitates exploration and learning in a workgroup and so contributes to an organization’s innovativeness. Several limitations and future research directions are mentioned.