Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and WINCan’s Research Director.
Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, Executive-in-Residence with the Monash University Faculty of Arts and a former Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo.
In part I of this two-part series, we described the context and content of reusable course modules to introduce higher education students to Employee-Led Innovation in the Workplace, and how the modules were deployed in a course unit at a university School of Business.
In this follow-on post, we will also explore our initial methods for assessing the development of learner capability for workplace innovation, including use of a new workplace tool for assessing aspects of innovation mindsets.
Developing Outcomes Assessment for Workplace Innovation Capability
Several approaches were developed to provide insights about the impact of these modules – some for us by the students themselves, others to inform our future evolution of the resources and activities.
Reflection: Throughout each module students were provided with reflection opportunities embedded within the modules through use of Google Docs. These opportunities were strategically placed at the end of each section and would invite students to reflect on the content, their past experiences, or future application plans. Throughout the term students provided positive feedback, focusing particularly on how engaging they found the reflection opportunities to be and the impetus they provided to better grasp the content. In addition, the students also reported that they found reading the reflections their peers posted to also be valuable.
“I enjoyed the reflection element of the modules, it forced me to be more engaged and to think harder about what I was learning.”
“I really enjoyed the module reflections through the google docs as it was interesting to see how my classmates interpreted the course content”
“I learned a lot not only from the multiple contents provided for each module but also learnt a lot from my peers. Sometimes, someone will include a thought-provoking thread and it gave me a chance to reflect on a topic that I am ignorant about. “
Application: As part of the course assessment activities, students were provided with opportunities to apply the concepts and practices covered in the modules through individual or group assignments. As an example, in module 1 learners are introduced to the concept of Job Crafting and its various facets, they are then invited to propose and implement a series of job crafting activities in a two-part assignment. This provided students with an experiential and authentic learning opportunity [i.e., “transformational learning through real world experiences”[1]]. As part of the assignment, students are required to implement their proposed changes that should be novel, beneficial to them (improving their quality of life) and to their workplace (improving organizational performance, which in the higher education workplace could focus on increasing their own performance on the course goals, since their learning is the Service offering in the institution’s mission).
Further, learners were free to decide whether they would like to focus this assignment on their student role – within the University, as their workplace for learning – or within their professional workplace, if they were working learners. Half of the students – all the working learners – implemented job crafting in their professional roles, which we took as a positive indicator that this capability was targeting workplace needs.
The other half of the class focused on their student’ roles for this assignment and their effort resulted in making changes to the way they view their courses (referred to in workplaces[2] as Cognitive Crafting) and allowed them to engage with their courses and course work in a more meaningful way. Some made changes to their study routine or focused on improving various skills such as time and project management (Skill and Task Crafting). Also, almost all students engaged with Relational Crafting and interacted more frequently and intentionally with their peers and professors.
This assignment provided a great opportunity for students to apply the concepts to their roles and improve their student experiences and performance by introducing change to their practices and approach. The job crafting assignment in particular received overwhelming positive response as it engaged students in positive change – by them and for them – in the work of learning.
“I took a lot from the job crafting assignment – both [parts] one and two.”
“I also liked the job crafting assignment, I adopted some of the concepts in my workplace to improve my job satisfaction.”
“The job crafting assignment actually helped me to improve my performance at work.”
Impact Measure: Finally, as part of the course learning activities students were presented with the Motivation To Innovate instrument (MTI) developed by our colleague Terry Soleas (2020)[3]. MTI was developed and tested via engagement with innovators in Canadian workplaces across sectors including sciences, humanities, social services, and business.
The MTI instrument is based on Expectancy-Value-Cost theory which focuses on various positive and negative facets of motivation[4]. This instrument is comprised of 5 constructs: expectancies, intrinsic task value, attainment task value, utility task value and cost.
Expectancies focus on “the confidence an individual has in their ability to succeed in a given task” (p. 7)3. Intrinsic Task Value focuses on the perceived enjoyment of a task, while the Attainment Task Value focuses on the sense of gratification as a result of completion of a task and Utility Task Value focuses on the associated rewards (direct or indirect)3. Finally, Cost refers to psychological and contextual costs of innovation, and promotion of innovation requires higher rates of Expectancies and Task value in face of these Costs.
The Expectancies and Intrinsic Task Value constructs includes 4 items each; “I am skilled at solving problems in novel circumstances” is an example of the former and “I find the process of innovating personally rewarding” an example of the latter construct. Attainment Task Value includes 5 items such as “Being innovative is important to my identity”, whereas Utility Task Value includes 8 items such as “If I am not innovating, I am likely to be less effective”. Finally, Costs contains 7 negatively worded items, an example of which is “Trying to innovate places a lot of pressure on me”.
Students were invited to complete the instrument during week 1 and again in week 11 as part of their weekly tasks; this allowed them to reflect on their innovation mindset at the start of the course and then later on their developmental progress during the course. The items were presented to students in 5-point Likert style format (1 to 5) ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. In the first round 33 students completed the task and in the last round 21 students. Table 1 below demonstrates the mean response to each of the constructs.
Comparison by Mean Week 1 (n=33) Week 11 (n=21)
Expectancies 3.71 4.49
Intrinsic Task Value 4.20 4.48
Attainment Task Value 3.28 3.54
Utility Task Value 3.56 4.04
Costs 2.94 2.56
Table 1. Mean response on MTI factors
As Table 1 depicts, there has been an increase in Expectancies, Intrinsic, Attainment and Utility Task Value. Of note is the increase in Expectancies which reflects students’ self confidence in their own abilities given their experience in this course. In addition, there is a desirable decrease in the Costs construct which reflects a decline in perceived risk of innovation. This further suggests that students are better equipped to engage with workplace innovation in their future roles.
While our use of the MIT inventory in this course offering was as a student learning activity to promote reflection, our future plans include further analysis of such course data on an individual level. This could allow us to identify the perceived effectiveness of the course learning activities in terms of students’ sense of their Identity, Self-Efficacy and Motivation as innovators in the workplace.
(This project was supported in part by a grant from eCampus Ontario’s Virtual Learning System program.)
References
[1] Pitchford, A., Owen, D., & Stevens, E. (2020). A handbook for authentic learning in higher education: Transformational learning through real world experiences. Routledge.
[2] Melo, N., Dourado, D., & Andrade, J. (2020). Reclaiming cognitive crafting: an integrative model of behavioral and cognitive practices in job crafting. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 29(5), 1302-1320. See also Bruning, P. F., & Campion, M. A. (2022). Assessing job crafting competencies to predict tradeoffs between competing outcomes. Human Resource Management, 61(1), 91-116.
[3] Soleas, E. K. (2020). What Factors and Experiences Motivate Innovators? An Expectancy-Value-Cost Approach to Promoting Student Innovation (Doctoral dissertation, Queen's University (Canada)).
[4] Barron, K. E., & Hulleman, C. S. (2015). Expectancy-value-cost model of motivation. Psychology, 84, 261-271.