The influence of organizational commitment and learning orientation on innovation in SMEs

Resumen

Innovation is a strategic capacity for organizations as they face new and greater challenges, such as processing a vast amount of information and knowledge, as well as responding quickly to increasingly uncertain changing environments. The objective of this is to evaluate, in an empirical way, a model that presents three causal relationships between theoretical constructs in a group of 250 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the state of Aguascalientes. The first one refers to whether organizational commitment has a positive and significant influence on the levels of learning orientation; the second is verifying if the organizational commitment has a positive and significant influence on the levels of inno­vation; and finally, inquiring if the learning orientation has a positive and significant impact on the level of innovation. The proposed model—which presents good adjustments—is validated through structural analysis using the confirmatory modeling strategy. Results are presented and they indicate that organi­zational commitment does have a positive and significant impact on the levels of learning orientation in the organization. Furthermore, learning orientation influences in a positive and significant way SMEs’ innovation in Aguascalientes. However, organizational commitment fails to show a significant positive influence on the innovation of SMEs in Aguascalientes.