TY - JOUR A1 - Gerpott, Fabiola H. A1 - Bledow, Ronald A1 - Kühnel, Jana T1 - Inspire but don't interfere T2 - Applied Psychology (ISSN 1464-0597) N2 - Managers play a pivotal role in the innovation process; yet, the mechanisms through which managers enhance or undermine innovation are not well understood. Drawing upon self-concordance theory, we argue that managers can augment employees’ self-concordance—defined as the congruence of goals and actions with inner values and preferences—through transformational behavior and thereby contribute to innovation. However, transformational behavior is closely coupled to another form of influence, namely process management, the attempt to directly manage innovation-related activities. This form of managerial influence reduces employees’ self-concordance and thereby undermines innovation. We test our conceptual model in a sample of 188 innovation projects using a contextualized method that asked employees to assess their self-concordance and their managers’ behavior during each project. Managers evaluated for each project the innovativeness of the outcome. Multi-level path-analysis provided support for our hypotheses. We discuss future research implications to disentangle innovation-facilitating and innovation-undermining facets of managerial influence. KW - Innovationsprojekt KW - Innovation project KW - Manager KW - Manager KW - Einfluss KW - Influence KW - Prozessmanagement KW - Process management KW - Selbstkonkordanz KW - Self-concordance KW - Transformationelle Führung KW - Transformational leadership Y1 - 2021 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-whu/frontdoor/index/index/docId/859 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:992-opus4-8594 N1 - Preprint submitted to Wiley VL - 2021 SP - 1 EP - 43 ER -