| Organisations need to develop innovations to meet emerging problems and challenges due to increasing global competition, customer expectations or market changes (Savelsbergh et al., 2012; Somech and Khalaili, 2014). These challenges require employees to create solutions in organisations. Such solutions, the innovations, are new products or processes for individuals, teams or organisations that can be useful to address challenges or to improve the current state (Messmann and Mulder, 2012). Because of the complexity of the challenges, employees need to work and learn together and co-operate with other institutions to develop novel, innovative solutions (Truijen et al., 2013). This also goes for vocational education where there are many challenges to meet the demands of students, the labour market and society. Thus, interdisciplinary work teams were formed that consist of educators with different qualifications, different responsibilities in their college and teach different subjects. They have to accomplish together organisationally relevant and knowledge intensive tasks and develop solutions to meet various challenges. Knowledge intensive tasks are non-routine tasks for accomplishing them a lot of knowledge from different disciplines is required. Such teams are embedded in the organisational context and consist of two or more individuals who socially interact and are interdependent to accomplish the team tasks. Other teams, such as R&D teams, have the same three characteristics (cf. Huang, 2009; Liu et al., 2013). Specific for the context of education is teachers’ long-standing individualism (Vangrieken et al., 2017), a higher stability of the teams with regard to their team composition in contrast to teams in some other domains, and the fact that the teams often work on projects that have to be carried out during one school year. Developing innovations requires innovative work behaviour (IWB) (Messmann and Mulder, 2012). IWB is defined “as the sum of physical and cognitive work activities carried out by employees in their work context, either solitarily or in a social setting, to accomplish a set of tasks that are required to achieve the goal of innovation development” (Messmann and Mulder, 2012, p. 45). Based on models of creativity and innovation, the four different categories of IWB are distinguished: first, opportunity exploration entails activities to scan the environment for opportunities to improve products, services, processes or strategies; second, idea generation means to develop new ideas on how problems can be solved or something novel can be developed; third, idea promotion entails activities to win and organise supporters for the idea. The promoter must explain the benefit of the idea, discuss the resources with team members and try to get permission; and fourth, idea realisation involves activities to implement the idea. It includes the development of the innovation, making it part of regular work processes and testing and modifying the outcome (De Jong and Den Hartog 2010; Messmann and Mulder, 2012). These different activities that lead to innovations require social interaction. |
