Workplace flexibility and innovation : The moderator effect of inter‐organizational cooperation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the moderator effect of inter‐organizational cooperation in the relationship between workplace flexibility and innovation performance. Design/methodology/approach – Postal survey to a sample of manufacturing and service firms. Hierarchical regression. Findings – It was found that innovation performance is positively associated to internal functional flexibility, and negatively to external numerical flexibility and outsourcing. Inter‐organizational cooperation moderates the relationships between functional flexibility, external numerical flexibility and outsourcing with innovation performance. Research limitations/implications – The study's single country setting could limit the generalizability of the findings. Longitudinal as opposed to cross‐sectional data are needed for studying the causal assumptions reported here. Practical implications – The results of this study suggest that high‐cooperation firms may compensate the negative impact of external flexibility and perform better than low‐cooperation firms. External knowledge and cooperation can be complementary. Managers should take into account that the benefits from external workplace (e.g. access to new knowledge) may be enhanced in the context of inter‐organizational cooperation. Originality/value – To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that tests whether inter‐organizational cooperation moderates the relationship between external numerical flexibility and innovation performance. The paper also investigates and applies internal and external flexibility in a single study which allows to compare how each of them impacts innovation performance.