arbiter
JournalsPricingAccount

GenAI and employee innovativeness: How employees' sensing capabilities and the capabilities to use and evaluate GenAI shape their innovative work behavior

Patrick Held & Tim Heubeck

Digital Business2025https://doi.org/10.1016/j.digbus.2025.100149article
ABDC C
Weight
0.48

What the paper says

Innovation is critical for organizational success, with employees' innovative work behavior (IWB) forming a key microfoundation of firm-level innovation. While prior research has identified various antecedents of IWB, the role of generative AI (GenAI) remains underexplored. We address this gap by investigating how employees' capabilities to use and evaluate GenAI influence their IWB. Building on the dynamic capabilities view, we further explore how employees' capabilities to sense technological shifts shape the development of these GenAI capabilities and ultimately foster IWB. We test our model using survey data from 439 business consultants in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, analyzed via partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Our results show that employees' sensing capabilities promote both GenAI capabilities and directly enhance IWB. While employees' capability to evaluate GenAI promotes IWB, GenAI usage capability does not. Moreover, we identify a significant mediation pathway: employees' sensing capabilities enhance GenAI usage capability, which in turn enables GenAI evaluation capability and thereby fosters IWB. This study contributes to the IWB literature by exploring relevant yet understudied antecedents: employees' sensing capabilities and their capabilities to use and evaluate GenAI. Moreover, it extends emerging research on GenAI in innovation management by adopting a differentiated capability perspective and uncovering the distinct roles and interplay of employees' GenAI usage and evaluation capabilities.

5 citations

Open paper page →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.digbus.2025.100149

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{patrick2025,
  title        = {{GenAI and employee innovativeness: How employees' sensing capabilities and the capabilities to use and evaluate GenAI shape their innovative work behavior}},
  author       = {Patrick Held & Tim Heubeck},
  journal      = {Digital Business},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.digbus.2025.100149},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

GenAI and employee innovativeness: How employees' sensing capabilities and the capabilities to use and evaluate GenAI shape their innovative work behavior

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.

Evidence weight

0.48

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.41 × 0.4 = 0.16
M · momentum0.63 × 0.15 = 0.09
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.