Exploring the relationship among human resource flexibility, organizational innovation and adaptability culture

Purpose Human resource (HR) flexibility is a firm-level capability that consists of employee skill flexibility, employee behavior flexibility, and HR practice flexibility. HR flexibility allows organizations to adapt and be responsive to changes in their environments. Findings from this paper indicate that if the organization is highly innovative and has flexible HR policies, then that influences organizational culture, risk-taking and experimentation within a firm. This paper has also revealed that process innovation mediates between adaptability culture and product innovation. It also revealed that managers should emphasize processes to improve efficiency for resource exploitation. The lessons learned from process innovation activities indicated that having a strong knowledge base assists a firm in developing innovative technology such as automation for manufacturing, handling and testing or simply smart manufacturing. Design/methodology/approach Questionnaires were sent to employees at 23 Taiwanese companies in high-tech industries, where innovation is the key to their survival, and 293 valid surveys were collected. Structural equation modeling, (SEM) using IBM SPSS Amos, was used to test the hypotheses. Findings The results fully support the hypotheses that HR flexibility positively influences adaptability culture and contributes to organizational innovation. Furthermore, it was found that adaptability culture has a direct impact on process innovation and an indirect impact on product innovation through process innovation. Originality/value The critical role of HR flexibility and adaptability culture on organizational innovation in the high-tech sector were highlighted. The importance of HR flexibility is emphasized to provide managerial hints to top managers.