How Does CPB Stimulate Employee Bootlegging? The Role of Work Engagement and Uncertainty Avoidance

Research concerned with bottom-up innovation has focused on the understanding the phenomenon of bootlegging, which refers to individual proactive research and development activities that employees carryout without formal approval or support. While much is known about the positive consequences of bootlegging for organizations, little is known how to create environment which would spark individual bootlegging. In this paper we propose that coworkers proactive behaviors can significantly influence employee bootlegging. Building on the job demands-resources theory, we propose that coworker proactive behavior will lead to employee bootlegging through work engagement. We further propose that employee uncertainty avoidance as a boundary condition for such an association. We test the model on three-wave, time-lagged data from 234 employees nested in 39 teams. The results of multilevel regression analysis showed that coworker proactive behavior was positively related to employee bootlegging through work engagement. The effect of work engagement on employee bootlegging was stronger when employee uncertainty avoidance was high rather than low. Additionally, the indirect effect of coworker proactive behavior on employee bootlegging through work engagement was stronger when uncertainty avoidance was high instead of low. We conclude this paper with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications and recommend directions for future research.