Utilitarianism or romanticism: the effect of rewards on employees' innovative behaviour

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to empirically explore the relationship between human resource rewards management and innovative behaviours, particularly between the utilitarianism and romanticism reward approaches and employee creativity in the workplace. Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts a quantitative approach. After analysing construct validity and reliability, the study empirically tests its hypotheses by performing a multi‐regression analysis with a sample of 216 individuals. Findings – The study reaches three main conclusions. First, tangible extrinsic rewards affect the innovative behaviour of employees in an “inverse‐U” shape. Second, intrinsic motivations have a substantially positive impact on the innovative behaviour of employees. And third, extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivations have positive interaction effects on individual creativity at the workplace. Originality/value – The paper focuses on the theoretical battle between the utilitarianism and the romanticism perspective of human resource reward approaches toward employees' creativity. Based on examination of the main effects of monetary incentives and intrinsic reward practices respectively, the study highlights a complementary view to explore a positive interaction between the two reward configurations, and to exploit a total reward system for facilitating individual innovative behaviours.