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As employees behaviour is a crucial factor for organizational success, the question on how to promote the engagement of employees in their work and boost their implication in the innovation process is central for companies. In this article we study this question building on the Karasek model suggesting that employees in jobs with high autonomy and time pressure will be more engaged and more innovative. The results of the multi–level regression analyses confirm that such a combination is associated with high employee innovation. For work engagement, the job autonomy helps in buffering the negative effects of time pressure. http://www.management-revue.org/current26.2.php http://dx.doi.org/10.1688/mrev-2015-02-DeSpiegelaere

Promoting the innovative potential of employees is a main challenge for HR professionals. Previous studies already stressed the role of job design for employee innovativeness. Building on the work of Karasek & Theorell (1990), we focus on the relation between job design, work engagement and innovative work behaviour (IWB). The results show that job control is positively related to both IWB and work engagement, job demands are negatively related to work engagement, yet their relation to IWB is more ambiguous. Significant interaction effects between job demands and job control variables in both the relation with work engagement and IWB are found, yet their nature differs significantly. We find that active jobs (high control and high demands) are related to lower levels of IWB in comparison to low-strain jobs (high control, low demands), which has major managerial consequences. nrpages: 20 status: published