Organizational behavior of embedded lead users

Thematically, this study falls within the broader context of innovation. 1 will use a rather wide conceptualization of innovation, and take various dispositions and behaviors into consideration that can be regarded to be beneficial for either invention or commercialization (March 1991 Roberts 1987]. To structure my research, 1 build on the above arguments and use an adapted interactionist framework that has been proposed by Woodman et aL (1993] as a theoretical model for innovation (and especially creativity] in the organizational context In their view, three distinct (antecedents, person, environment] factors are predictors of creative and innovative behavior in organization. They state (Woodman et aL 1993, pp. 294]  

Taking an interactionist perspective, the environment in the form of social and contextual effects influences both personal factors and employee behavior. Employees of firms who also use the products of their employing firms receive different stimuli than non-users do normally, work and leisure are perceived to be distinct, non-overlapping domains (cf. Harry 1971 Kelly and Kelly 1994). Embedded users contextualization is not that clear cut. As both their work and non-work (e.g. leisure) lives are related with the same domain, both contexts will overlap. On the one hand, embedded users will not be able to abandon the use (and leisure) context when they are at work. On the other hand, their work context will still play a role when they use products in their use environment. Non-user employees will not experience this migration of use context into 

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