ABSTRACT
Staff with specific employment characteristics may perceive organisation life differently as has been identified in organisational culture and climate literature. This chapter reports on a study reviewing characteristics of working tenure, job type, work group, work role and workplace flexibility within a public sector organisation to identify how they perceive workplace innovation related to public sector culture. Significant differences were found between the role of different levels of managers in supporting workplace innovation with their approach found to be conflicting across the levels studied. Analysis results identifying respondents found it difficult to describe aspects of being individual and team innovation. With the organisation it was significant that individual innovation is not understood and less commonly practiced. Instead, team innovation was prevalent and embedded within the culture as staff worked on tasks in teams. The findings highlighted potential issues in implementing workplace innovation as individuals in the workplace with specific employment characteristics have different perspectives created a lack of common understanding so impeding the development of organisational innovation processes. Actions are proposed to use this understanding to build approaches to fostering innovation by being aware of the variances of perceptions between individuals with differing employment characteristics.
