How to Establish a Sustainable Organization? A Study on the Relationship between Social Work Characteristics and Innovativeness for Employees of Organizations

The shaping of employees’ innovativeness is an important way of building a sustainable organization. Therefore, in order to have a sustainable police organization, the innovativeness of the police must be established in order to achieve the objective of maintaining law and order. In this study, Taiwan’s first-line border police officers served as the research subject, and the cross-level model perspective was adopted to investigate their innovativeness from task-oriented and socially oriented viewpoints. At the same time, investigations were made into the cross-level direct and indirect effects of social work characteristics and collective efficacy toward police officers’ self-efficacy and innovativeness. A multilevel model was adopted to analyze the quantitative data obtained with 249 border police officers in Taiwan as the research objects. The results showed that social work characteristics have a positive influence on collective efficacy, and motivational work characteristics have a positive influence on employees’ self-efficacy and innovativeness. Their self-efficacy showed a positive influence on innovativeness, and a mediating effect on the relationship between motivational work characteristics and innovativeness. Moreover, social work characteristics and collective efficacy have a cross-level contextual effect on self-efficacy and innovativeness, while social work characteristics and self-efficacy have a cross-level interaction on police officers’ innovativeness. In general, this study confirmed the importance of employees’ innovativeness for the establishment of a sustainable police organization. The characteristics of social and motivational work, self-efficacy, and collective effectiveness are important variables for establishing employees’ innovativeness.