Organizational antecedents to bootlegging and consequences for the newness of the innovation portfolio

Literature on strategy, innovation, and portfolio management has recently shown increased interest in the concept of planned emergence. This builds on an understanding that organizations' innovation is triggered both by deliberate top-down management approaches as well as emergent bottom-up processes. However, little is known on how to effectively plan emergence. In this context, bootlegging has been mentioned as a potential approach, describing instances in which employees choose to innovate without the knowledge and permission of top managers. Whereas past research has focused on the individual employee, we shift the perspective to the overall tendency of bootlegging in organizations. We investigate which organizational conditions facilitate the propensity of bootlegging becoming a widespread practice in an organization, and how this tendency is associated with the organization's innovativeness. Drawing on the theory of creative deviance, we argue that organizations deploying management practices fostering emergent and induced innovation initiatives increase structural strain and thereby bootlegging tendency in such organizations. As more innovation initiatives are elaborated outside the formal process, the number and diversity of ideas outside the strategic scope should increase. Higher bootlegging tendency is thereby proposed to be associated with higher portfolio innovativeness. Empirical evidence from the study of 930 respondents in 124 firms supports the notion that management practices supporting emergent innovation initiatives increase bootlegging tendency, which in turn increases newness of the organization's innovation portfolio.


| INTRODUCTION
As organizations strive for attaining and maintaining competitive advantage through renewal and innovation (Tushman & O'Reilly, 2002), scholars have recognized that formal and rigid processes are insufficient to strategically respond to changes in the environment and deal with radical innovation (Loch, 2000;McKiernan & Morris, 1994).Therefore, strategy literature proposes the concept of "planned emergence".This entails shifting from a deliberate, top-down planning of corporate strategy and the resulting resource deployment, to flexible micro-level practices recognizing new opportunities partly guided by corporate goals (Grant, 2003).Similarly, in the innovation literature the perspective on corporate innovation has shifted from being primarily a product of management-induced organizational activities to emergent practices in and around organizational structures to realize innovation (Courpasson et al., 2016).The project portfolio literature at the interface between strategic planning and implementation also acknowledges that portfolios are not always top-down driven but to some degree emergent (Martinsuo, 2013).
In this context, and at the focus of this research, bootlegging (Knight, 1967) is conceptualized as an approach supporting emergent strategy execution to achieve more innovative new product portfolios (Kopmann et al., 2017;Martinsuo & Geraldi, 2020).As such, bootlegging is understood as a mean to overcome the inertia of the organization for innovation (Koch & Leitner, 2008).The concept of bootlegging describes bottom-up, unplanned ideation activities through which innovation ideas are initiated and elaborated without authorization but to the benefit of the organization (Augsdorfer, 1996).These activities are hidden from senior management, albeit being, to a certain degree, evident to colleagues and sometimes line managers.Bootlegging often entails using resources procured by the employees themselves or diverted from official projects (Criscuolo et al., 2014).
Most of the existing literature on bootlegging focuses on the individual bootlegging employee.Thus, factors like self-efficacy, need for achievement, creativity, risk affinity, intrinsic job motivation, and job status have been identified as relevant for bootlegging behavior (Alexy et al., 2016;Augsdorfer, 2012;Criscuolo et al., 2014;Globocnik, 2019;Globocnik & Salomo, 2015).Furthermore, characteristics of the personal job design such as the degree of work discretion, reward systems, and work environment, in terms of the climate for innovation and the formality of the innovation process, have also been associated with bootlegging (Criscuolo et al., 2014;Globocnik & Salomo, 2015;Hornsby et al., 1999;Kuratko et al., 2005;Masoudnia & Szwejczewski, 2012).However, due to its focus on the individual level, prior bootlegging research neither answers, if bootlegging is a proper approach for organizational renewal, nor how organizations can actually "plan" emergence, i.e., facilitate the overall potential of emergence.This requires an organizational view on bootlegging as an organizational tendency.Drawing on prior research (Augsdorfer, 1996;Criscuolo et al., 2014;Globocnik & Salomo, 2015;Pinchot, 1985), we define bootlegging tendency as the extent to which an

Practitioner points
• Bootlegging tendency refers to the inclination among the organization's employees to take initiative to work on own ideas without official organizational support, resources, and senior management knowledge or approval.• Managers who encourage their employees to create and realize their own ideas through idea management systems and personal support also increase, as an unintended by-product, the bootlegging tendency in their organization Senior management involvement into innovation activities reduces the bootlegging tendency.
• Organizations with a higher bootlegging tendency are more likely to also achieve higher newness of their innovation portfolios; thus, although employees ignore formal rules, organizations are likely to benefit from a higher bootlegging tendency among their employees.• Bootlegging can help the organization to overcome its innovation inertia, to recognize and act on opportunities not considered in the organization's deliberate strategy and facilitate innovation at low additional costs.
organization's employees involved in innovation tasks engage in non-programed, self-initiated innovation activities without formal approval and support from their organization.
If a strict focus on realizing deliberate strategies may hinder innovation (Kopmann et al., 2017;Maniak & Midler, 2014), and bootlegging is suggested as an approach enabling the renewal of innovation portfolios (Martinsuo & Geraldi, 2020), the newness of the innovation portfolio can be considered the most relevant outcome of the organization's bootlegging tendency.Innovative products, services, and processes offer solutions to unmet customer needs have the potential to create new markets, provide differentiation from competitors, improve performance in core processes, which together may result in higher sales, premium prices, and higher profit margins (e.g., Calantone et al., 2006;Sandvik & Sandvik, 2003).A highly innovative project is more risky, complex, and requiring more resources (Sorescu & Spanjol, 2008).From a portfolio perspective, however, resource losses from failed highly innovative projects seem to get more than compensated by gains from successful ones (Cooper et al., 2004a(Cooper et al., , 2004b)), and higher newness of the innovation portfolio has been shown to be associated with higher firm performance (Schultz, Salomo, & Talke, 2013;Talke et al., 2011;Tellis et al., 2009).While a more innovative new product portfolio may be attractive to firms, prior bootlegging research is inconclusive about the actual outcomes of bootlegging tendency for the organization.Scholars have raised concerns that bootlegging diverts resources from official projects and affects the efficiency of formal innovation processes (Kanter, 2000;Roussel et al., 1991).Other authors focus on potential innovative upsides of such behavior and claim bootlegging outcomes as always benefiting the organization (Augsdorfer, 1996).Anecdotal evidence stresses the potential of bootlegging to result in breakthrough innovations (Leicht-Deobald & Lins, 2017), which appears to be in contrast to a study on numerous bootleg projects reporting most of these projects to yield rather incremental improvements (Augsdorfer, 2005).Therefore, it is still unclear whether organizations with a higher bootlegging tendency are also more likely to achieve higher newness of their innovation portfolios.We aim to contribute to resolving this controversy on the desirability of bootlegging for organizations.As such we study, at an organization level, whether organizations with higher bootlegging tendency may benefit by achieving higher newness of their innovation portfolios.Answering this question is adamant to determine whether bootlegging tendency is at all an effective approach of planned emergence, facilitating organizational renewal.With our findings, we also contribute to prior literature on creative projects and radical innovations (Criscuolo et al., 2014;Donada et al., 2021;O'Connor & McDermott, 2004), which has emphasized the idea of secrecy, manifested in concepts such as underground innovation, skunk works, and satellite exploration structures as necessary to overcome organizational inertia and innovation barriers.
Furthermore, past research on planned emergence has stressed the role of emergent pattern identification for performance (Kopmann et al., 2017) and acknowledged the relevance of micro-level activities, particularly bootlegging, to provide the necessary input for emergent strategies (Cunha & Cunha, 2006;Martinsuo & Geraldi, 2020).However, this research has remained vague how to actually "plan" this emergence.Through our organizational-level lens on bootlegging, we aim to contribute to this literature by showing which innovation management practices commonly used to facilitate organizational innovation are conducive or detrimental to the bootlegging tendency in organizations.We thereby extend our knowledge how to regulate bootlegging in organizations to create the required input for emergent strategies.
Thus, this research sets out to investigate, from an organizational-level perspective, (i) how bootlegging tendency relates to the achievement of higher newness of the innovation portfolio, and (ii) how to plan for emergence by managing the likelihood of bootlegging in the organization through practices influencing this tendency.
To answer these questions, we draw on the theory of creative deviance (Mainemelis, 2010) to identify relevant managerial practices that might explain the bootlegging tendency in an organization and develop hypotheses on its relationship to organization innovativeness.We test the resulting model using multi-respondent data collected from 930 respondents in 124 firms in Germany and Austria.

| THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND HYPOTHESES
2.1 | Theory of creative deviance Mainemelis (2010) puts forward a theory to explain creative deviance as nonconforming behavior in organizations.With this conceptual work, Mainemelis suggests conditions causing organizations to face more or less creative behavior among their employee base, as well as its organizational implications.Mainemelis draws on Merton's (1968) strain theory, which conceptualizes structural strain as emerging in social systems in which achieving culturally defined goals, deemed as legitimate by the social context, is impeded by the system's inability to provide their members access to legitimate "means for attaining those cultural goals" (Mainemelis, 2010, p. 559).
Creative deviance is defined as the elaboration of ideas in direct violation of explicit managerial orders to stop said elaboration.The tendency of creative deviance in organizations is argued to depend upon the level of strain, which is determined by (i) the number of available ideas and (ii) the resources available for idea elaboration.Structural strain occurs in situations in which the organizational resources necessary for elaborating ideas are not sufficient for supporting all ideas proposed.Organizations with a high proficiency in encouraging the generation and communication of new ideas will have high numbers of new idea proposals and thereby increased structural strain (Mainemelis, 2010).Due to resource scarcity, organizations are often unable to support all proposed ideas, as resource allocation often follows efficiency and effectiveness considerations (Lin et al., 2016).This resource limitation also determines the level of strain in the organization.As such, higher rates of creative deviance develop in organizations in which there is a generalized encouragement for the generation and communication of new ideas, but the number of created ideas surpasses the organization's ability to provide resources for the elaboration of all the proposed ideas.These contextual sources of structural strain are conceptualized to "increase the rate of creative deviance" (Mainemelis, 2010, p. 574, emphasis in the original) in organizations.Mainemelis thereby indicates that his conceptual work explains the tendency of creative deviance at the organizational level and recognizes that further "individual differences can explain why some people are more likely than others to engage in creative deviance under the same contextual conditions" (Mainemelis, 2010, p. 574).
Regarding the organizational implications of creative deviance, Mainemelis further suggests an association between the outcomes of creative deviance with higher degrees of innovation.Ideas developed under creative deviance are elaborated without supervision and monitoring and are thereby less subject to biases against radical new ideas and social pressures for conformity and consistency (Mainemelis, 2010).

| Creative deviance and bootlegging tendency
The phenomenon of bootlegging is closely related to creative deviance.Bootlegging is defined as "the process by which individuals take the initiative to work on ideas that have no formal organizational support and are often hidden from the sight of senior management, but are undertaken with the aim of producing innovations that will benefit the company" (Criscuolo et al., 2014(Criscuolo et al., , p. 1288)).The activities are not part of an official innovation program or a department's action plan, lack official authorization, and have no formal resources allocated to them (Augsdorfer, 1996).Thereby, bootlegging describes situations in which employees covertly work on ideas without managerial permission or even against managerial orders.Creative deviance is a narrower concept, as it is limited to situations where employees ask management for permission to elaborate an idea, get rejected, and then continue working on the idea in violation of managerial orders (Mainemelis, 2010).In the extreme case that employees continue working on an idea despite it being formally stopped by management, bootlegging can be seen as an act of creative deviance, but not vice versa (Criscuolo et al., 2014).Bootlegging is thereby a broader concept that entails, but is not limited to, creative deviance (Lin et al., 2016).
Literature typically conceptualizes bootlegging as located at the individual level, describing an employee's behavior contingent upon individual characteristics, and the individual job environment of the bootlegging employee (Globocnik & Salomo, 2015).In contract, this research applies an organizational-level conceptualization referred to as bootlegging tendency.Bootlegging tendency is defined as the likelihood or inclination among the organization's employees responsible for innovation tasks to engage in bootlegging, i.e., to take initiative to work on own ideas without official organizational support, resources, and senior management knowledge or approval.A high bootlegging tendency within an organization implies that bootlegging is a common behavioral approach of an entire employee group and thereby emerging on a regular base.
Drawing on the theory of creative deviance, bootlegging tendency is assumed to emerge in situations characterized by structural strain created by organizational measures related to innovation activities.When organizations encourage innovation under conditions of resource scarcity, structural strain becomes manifest.Organizations in pursuit of innovation establish behavioral norms favoring innovative idea generation and venturing into the unknown to explore the potential of more innovative ideas.Structural strain is explicitly generated through managerial practices fostering idea generation.At the individual level, innovation management measures have been identified as encouraging proactivity in taking initiatives for innovation (Frese et al., 1996) and taking charge (Morrison & Phelps, 1999).Formal communication of innovation goals (Amabile et al., 1996;Ireland et al., 2009), incentivizing idea submissions (Toubia, 2006), and establishing an innovation-friendly climate (Jung et al., 2008) are prominent examples of measures taken to encourage idea generation.
Simultaneously, resources for idea elaboration by legitimate means are limited, and resource allocation to official projects is steered through formal criteria and processes to address efficiency and effectiveness considerations (Globocnik & Salomo, 2015).More ideas competing for limited resources result in structural strain, which give raise to a higher likelihood of illegitimate behavior to cope with these opposing forces in order to achieve the legitimate innovation goal (Mainemelis, 2010).This corresponds to the observation of prior research on bootlegging that a lack of official resources and R&D budget restrictions facilitate going "underground" (Abetti, 1997), while maintaining the aim to explore opportunities assumed to be beneficial for the organization (Augsdorfer, 2005;Masoudnia & Szwejczewski, 2012).
Regarding the organizational implications of outcomes resulting from acts of creative deviance, Mainemelis (2010) suggests higher degrees of innovation, which can also apply to the context of bootlegging tendency.Bootlegging entails the generation and exploration of innovation ideas that may be outside the organization's current focus and beyond risk thresholds (Burgelman & Sayles, 1986;Pinchot, 1985).This can take place either against direct managerial orders or by simply hiding from the sight of senior management, with employees either procuring their own resources or deploying organizational resources committed to other objectives for the pursuit of unofficial ideas (Criscuolo et al., 2014).This enables bypassing of monitoring and premature rejection of ideas as well as diminishing the visibility of possible failures (Garud et al., 2011;Koch & Leitner, 2008).Once ideas are refined, their potential may become clearer for the organization, thus reducing the risk of being rejected.Hence, a stronger bootlegging tendency may enable more widespread exploration and development of ideas, whose high degree of novelty places them outside the organization's current scope.Such stronger bootlegging tendency of an organization could be understood as a potential source of higher organizational innovativeness.

| Organizational antecedents of bootlegging tendency
Bootlegging tendency will emerge in systems in which organizational norms encourage the generation and expression of new ideas, while resource allocation following stringent criteria limits the possibility to pursue all ideas.Mainemelis (2010) argues that measures like creativity trainings, innovation rewards, a climate of psychological safety, and management support for innovation facilitate organizational creativity and thus will reflect on higher rates of creative deviance.However, these measures, being focused on opening up the organization to new ideas (Mainemelis, 2010), do not fully reflect the range of managerial practices related to innovation activities.To better capture managerial measures at the organizational innovation system-level with potentially distinct impact on the bootlegging tendency of an organization, we suggest differentiating these practices according to (i) the extent in which they dictate specific domains in which to seek innovation opportunities and (ii) the modes through which control is exerted to encourage actions supporting the organization's objectives (Cardinal et al., 2017).
Certain managerial practices stimulate the generation of ideas without indicating specific domains for innovation.We conceptualize initiatives resulting from such stimuli as emergent initiatives.On the other hand, different measures may induce initiatives by providing deliberate impulses to direct innovation initiatives into specific domains.The nature of these measures is relevant in the context of creative deviance.Encouraging emergent initiatives through openness to initiatives in any given domain may signal a greater emphasis by the organization on innovation as an overarching goal (Mainemelis, 2010).Guiding innovation activities into specific domains, on the other hand, also encourages innovation activities, albeit setting clear content-related boundaries to these activities.Thus, managerial measures might have a different impact on the tendency in an organization to "fly under the radar" depending on whether they facilitate emergent or induced initiatives.
Further, we categorize managerial measures into formal and personal managerial measures: formal measures include procedures or systems formally established in the organization to provide the organizational architecture to guide innovative behavior.Personal managerial measures encompass direct and informal interventions by managers to support or steer innovation activities.In combination, these two dimensions characterize managerial measures targeted at innovation initiatives.Similar to measures encouraging emergent and induced activities, these managerial measures might have different impacts on bootlegging tendency.Formal measures, which rely on organizational procedures and systems, clearly articulate innovation-related organizational goals, determining them as "worth striving for" (Mainemelis, 2010, p. 559), delimiting the scope and nature of the means through which these goals may be attained (Cardinal, 2001;Ouchi, 1979).Personal managerial measures follow a similar pattern but relying less on formal criteria.Instead, this type of measures dictates, through the active involvement of management in innovation projects, both project scope and means.Here, it is through hierarchical social control that goals are established as legitimate and the access to resources is regulated through personal interaction of managers with their employees (Cardinal, 2001;Ouchi, 1979).The relevance of this differentiation in the context of bootlegging tendency emerges in light of past research, which has shown that in situations in which tasks are difficult to program, e.g., when tasks are novel, uncertain, or managers lack knowledge how to execute them as in the case of many innovation activities, social controls are more useful than formal controls (e.g., Kirsch, 2004;Ouchi, 1979).
Based on these 2x2 dimensions, we differentiate four specific practices, which each represent a prominent example of an innovation management measure for each combination of the two dimensions described.Building on the concept of creative deviance theory, we develop the arguments on how these specific practices relate to bootlegging tendencies (Figure 1).

| Idea management systems
Idea management systems refer to systematic approaches of the organization installed to facilitate generation, submission, and assessment of ideas (El Sherbiny & Abdel Aziz, 2014;Van Dijk & Van Den Ende, 2002).They represent formal innovation management elements of the organization and typically foster emergent innovation initiatives by providing a platform for the submission of ideas of potential value to the organization (Björk & Magnusson, 2009).Idea management systems structurally open up access to legitimate means to pursue the organizational innovation goal and facilitate increased idea submissions (Amabile & Pratt, 2016;Van Dijk & Van Den Ende, 2002).Investments into installing and maintaining an idea management system signal the organization's interest in proactivity (Frese et al., 1999).Furthermore, formal idea suggestion systems reduce barriers to communicate ideas to the organization by providing a legitimate platform for these ideas (Amabile & Pratt, 2016;Soukhoroukova et al., 2012), thus contributing to maximize the number of new ideas proposed in the organization.Idea management systems also increase the perceived system responsiveness to new ideas.Providing an organization-wide platform for idea submission, a transparent assessment of ideas, and information on the status of submitted ideas indicate a fair and earnest treatment of ideas by the organization, as well as the intention to realize such ideas where possible (Kock et al., 2015;Mainemelis, 2010).Reward mechanisms that emphasize the recognition from the organization for the generation and communication of ideas may also encourage the submission of ideas (Frese et al., 1999).Idea management systems have a signaling effect, conveying the value placed by the organization on creativity and innovation and thus highlight innovation as a legitimate organizational goal (Mainemelis, 2010).As such, employees' awareness of and exposure to idea management platforms strengthen their innovative behavior and increase the submission of high-quality ideas (Kruft & Kock, 2021).These characteristics of idea management systems are thus likely to increase the number of ideas communicated to the organization.Idea management systems often integrate formal criteria for idea evaluation and selection (Soukhoroukova et al., 2012).Consequently, idea management systems increase the chance that some ideas, which do not fit evaluation criteria, are excluded from further development.More innovative ideas might also get stuck in the selection process when they exceed the area of expertise of line managers, who typically evaluate their employees' ideas.Ideas that require escalation to higher levels to get the buy-in from multiple areas often cannot pass the red tape due to conflicting priorities (Benbya & Leidner, 2018).Once rejected or stuck, ideas usually cannot be further pursued through legitimate means, making it necessary to resort to secrecy for further elaboration.We propose that idea management systems will intensify the structural strain by increasing the number of ideas generated in the organization, and that under these conditions of higher strain, organizations will experience a higher bootlegging tendency.Thus, we propose, Hypothesis 1. Organizations favoring stronger use of idea management systems show higher levels of bootlegging tendency.

| Management support
Managers can shift the attention in the organization towards innovation goals and encourage the development of creative ideas by informally supporting innovative behavior (Amabile et al., 1996;Amabile & Pratt, 2016).Highlighting benefits of innovation for the organization like improved performance (Augsdorfer, 2005) or relinquishing the status quo (Koch & Leitner, 2008), managers signal support of emergent innovation without prescribing in too much detail what kind of ideas should be pursued (Scott & Bruce, 1994).Initiatives for innovation, including calculated risk-taking, can be encouraged through verbal persuasion on the benefits of innovation for the organization and by explicitly welcoming new ideas (Amabile et al., 1996;Krause, 2004;Scott & Bruce, 1994;Tierney et al., 1999).Particularly, if such signals of support endure through critical periods when investment into innovation is questioned, management support sets an organizational agenda of innovation affinity (Jung et al., 2008).Paired with an imprecise definition of the domain in which ideas are desirable, this kind of support increases the number of generated ideas in an organization.A further positive signal from managers can be the allocation of resources not dedicated to specific projects (Judge et al., 1997;Nijhof et al., 2002), which again serves as additional encouragement of innovation when such support is provided alongside the acknowledgement that ideas may also fail (Drazin et al., 1999;Hornsby et al., 2002;Mumford et al., 2002).Management support may also entail support in overcoming organizational barriers (Hornsby et al., 2002;Pearce et al., 1997), e.g., by supporting ideas through, or even bypassing the formal approval process for innovation activities in the early stage (Howell & Higgins, 1990;Masoudnia & Szwejczewski, 2012;Pearce et al., 1997).
Hence, management support encourages the generation and communication of new ideas by directly and informally influencing the implicit knowledge in the organization on the legitimacy of innovation goals (Amabile & Pratt, 2016;Büschgens et al., 2013;Wilkins & Ouchi, 1983).In line with this, management support has been shown to be associated with employee creativity (Amabile et al., 1996), innovative behavior (Rosing et al., 2011;Scott & Bruce, 1994), and idea suggestion (Frese et al., 1999;Hornsby et al., 1999;Kuratko et al., 2005;Oldham & Cummings, 1996).On an individual level, evidence on the positive association between management support and employees bootlegging activities has been empirically observed (Criscuolo et al., 2014), as have related behaviors such as bypassing formal procedures to pursue ideas and realizing improvements without being officially assigned to such activities (Hornsby et al., 1999;Kuratko et al., 2005).On an organizational level, creative encouragement has also been demonstrated to facilitate front-end effectiveness and efficiency, and ultimately project portfolio success (Kock et al., 2015).Organizations characterized by management support encouraging employees to engage in innovation activities will have more ideas competing for the available resources.Thereby, management support, with its facilitation of idea creation and communication, intensifies the structural strain, increasing in turn the bootlegging tendency in the organization.
Thus, we propose, Hypothesis 2. Organizations experiencing stronger management support for innovation activities show higher levels of bootlegging tendency.

| Formal innovation strategy
Formal innovation strategy refers to a written and well communicated, and thus visible, documentation of the organization's innovation goals and the legitimate means to achieve them.It determines the organization's objectives, target customers and technologies, focused business areas, and activities at the program level (Bart, 2002;Bart & Pujari, 2007;Salomo et al., 2008).It is a deliberate innovation path induced by the organization to exercise control over the behavior of its members by formally specifying the desired output and the legitimate means necessary to attain these goals (Cardinal et al., 2017).
Defining goals in a formal innovation strategy sends a clear signal that achieving innovation outcomes is a legitimate objective in the organization.Formal communication of innovation objectives reduces information and knowledge asymmetries among organization members about the organizational goals (Amabile & Pratt, 2016;Jaworski & Macinnis, 1989).With the commitment to strategic innovation goals, resources are allocated only to goal-congruent activities.By defining target markets and activities at the program level, and thus setting clear normative expectations, a formal innovation strategy limits access to resources necessary to elaborate ideas that do not match these targets (Salomo et al., 2008).Clear strategic priorities increase front-end efficiency and project portfolio success (Kock et al., 2015).Further, formal commitment to strive for new markets and technologies have also been associated with higher innovativeness of the innovation portfolio (Talke et al., 2011).Formally prescribed goals and program activities set organizational priorities guiding decisions about innovation project selection and resource allocation (Benner & Tushman, 2003), thereby impeding the open pursuit of ideas outside the scope determined by the formal strategy.
Consequently, a formal innovation strategy is assumed to increase the structural strain by limiting resources available for idea elaboration.It does so by emphasizing the relevance of innovation for the organization through clear innovation goals and legitimizing the pursuit of innovation activities.However, the allocation of resources to elaborate those ideas is conditional to their congruence to the legitimate space delineated by the formal strategy.This limits the access to resources for ideas outside defined target domains and thereby increases the structural strain in the organization.Such strain will then result in a higher bootlegging tendency in the organization, as this behavioral strategy becomes the only way to elaborate ideas outside the defined strategic scope.The relationship between the organization's formality of the innovation strategy and bootlegging behavior has, to our best knowledge, not been investigated so far.However, past research at the individual level suggests that employees are motivated to innovate secretly when they fear their ideas do not fit the strategic scope of the organization (Burgelman, 1983;Koch & Leitner, 2008).Thus, we propose: Hypothesis 3. Organizations with a formalized innovation strategy show higher levels of bootlegging tendency.

| Senior management involvement
Senior management involvement refers to senior managers directly intervening in innovation activities by initiating, selecting, and promoting specific innovation projects.By getting personally and actively involved in innovation activities, they exert hierarchical social control in pursuit of organizational innovation goals (Amabile & Pratt, 2016;Kuratko et al., 2005;Scott & Bruce, 1994).
Senior management involvement has a direct impact on which ideas are elaborated in the organization as opposed to the support of supervisors who encourage their employees to take initiative and help them to get their own ideas off the ground (Schultz et al., 2019).When senior managers define innovation initiatives, monitor their development, and personally control resource allocation, their involvement limits the resources available for employees to elaborate their own ideas.The scarcity of resources for ideas outside the organization's scope increases through project selection that favors the priorities of senior managers (Cardinal, 2001).Consequently, senior management involvement is suggested to increase the structural strain by reducing the resources available for employees to elaborate their own ideas in legitimate ways as senior managers allocate resources to initiatives defined as relevant by themselves.At the organizational level, senior management involvement in innovation projects has also been found to reduce the innovativeness of the innovation portfolio (Schultz et al., 2019) suggesting also less resources for employees to explore highly innovative opportunities.This, in turn, increases the tendency in the organization to engage in bootlegging as it crystalizes as the only behavioral strategy available to achieve the overall organizational innovation goal with ideas that do not fit senior managers' preferences.Prior research at the individual level of analysis supports this line of argument suggesting that employees engage in bootlegging because they fear ad-hoc project interruptions and disapproval of their innovation initiatives by senior managers (Abetti, 1997;Koch & Leitner, 2008) or because senior managers' resource planning periods are too long (Augsdorfer, 2008).Thus, we propose, Hypothesis 4. Organizations experiencing stronger senior management involvement in innovation activities show a higher levels of bootlegging tendency.

| Management means and strain strength
Innovation management measures aimed at encouraging idea generation and submission increase strain and result in higher tendencies of bootlegging in the organization in general.As argued above, strain comes from opposing forces.Measures may encourage initiatives and innovative behavior, maximizing the number of ideas communicated to the organization.Simultaneously, these ideas are met with general resource restrictions and embedded mechanisms, which restrict the number of ideas that can actually be developed (Mainemelis, 2010).As such, strain is an ambiguous situation, in which innovation activities are simultaneously encouraged and limited."Flying under the radar" emerges as a coping mechanism to deal with such ambiguity by bootlegging.On the surface, rules are followed, and efficiency and effectiveness considerations are adhered to, while at the same time living up to the demand of promoting innovation.
Nonetheless, we suggest that the strain-enhancing effect of measures that stimulate emergent initiatives will be stronger than the effect of measures promoting induced initiatives, as the latter guide initiatives to predefined domains resulting in the generation of ideas that fit domains deemed as legitimate.Measures stimulating emergent initiatives create a strong stimulus to generate ideas by highlighting overarching organizational innovation goals, without the same inherent selfselection bias that characterizes idea inducing measures.This results in the generation and communication of a higher number of ideas across different domains.As measures stimulating induced initiatives clearly define the scope in which ideas are welcomed, they also emphasize the legitimate means through which these ideas are to be developed.The level of formalization implied by a clear innovation strategy, acts as a visible and explicit boundary system of control, setting requirements for resource allocation (Cardinal, 2001).Similarly, senior management involvement exerts control by regulating organizational behavior through agenda setting and limiting access to resources, albeit through uncodified forms of control.While the control mechanisms entailed in idea inducing measures differ in terms of formalization, both focus on conforming to norms regulating the allocation of resources to projects within defined domains (Cardinal et al., 2017).In contrast, measures stimulating emergent initiatives, encourage the generation and communication of ideas and emphasize the relevance of creativity and innovation for the organization (Mainemelis, 2010).Placing less attention on the legitimate means to pursue innovative ideas may allow allocating resources from other sources or supporting ideas outside the scope through or around formal selection processes (Howell & Higgins, 1990;Masoudnia & Szwejczewski, 2012;Pearce et al., 1997).Hence, measures towards emergent initiatives may inherently signal a certain tolerance for deviation.Overall, emergent innovation measures should create more strain by facilitating the creation of a larger number of ideas, with more ideas being outside strategic focus.With the resulting strain being larger for emergent as opposed to induced innovation measures, the impact on the bootlegging tendency of an organization is also expected to be stronger for emergent as opposed to induced innovation measures.
Thus, we suggest: Hypothesis 5.The use of idea management systems and management support for innovation activities shows a stronger positive relationship with bootlegging tendency than a formalized innovation strategy and senior management involvement in innovation activities.

| Organizational outcome of bootlegging tendency
Established organizations tend to prefer mature technologies, well-known markets, and not questioning the status quo (Ahuja & Lampert, 2001;Benner & Tushman, 2003;Smith & Tushman, 2005).Radically new ideas entail higher levels of risk, their feasibility and potential are uncertain, and are outside the current scope of the organization.Consequently, their rejection is more likely, as formal selection processes tend to filter out risky ideas with insufficient fit with the status quo.In addition, managers tend to avoid backing and sponsoring risky ideas, which can potentially backfire on their careers in case of failure (Ahuja & Lampert, 2001;Dougherty & Heller, 1994;O'Connor & DeMartino, 2006).Therefore, it is not surprising that companies often have multiple under-the-radar projects, which are not formally managed and monitored, to avoid inefficiencies stemming from rigid formal portfolio management processes (Blichfeldt & Eskerod, 2008;Loch, 2000).Especially radical new projects are known to require a less formalized process or even taking place outside formal structures and to rely on informal networks Ideas that are elaborated through an act of creative deviance, compared with ideas which are pursued with permission of the management, are more likely to be radically new because they are less subject to organizational biases against more novel innovation (Mainemelis, 2010).Following this proposition, we suggest that organizations with higher bootlegging tendencies will also show higher levels of newness in their innovation portfolio by allowing for more radically new ideas being elaborated outside formal processes.Bootlegging can be seen as a behavioral strategy to overcome organizational inertia (Koch & Leitner, 2008) by enabling the exploration of new opportunities for which the organization is not yet ready.It is also an organizational behavior providing the input for emergent strategy recognition necessary to adapt the innovation project portfolio to new opportunities recognized offside strategic planning activities (Kopmann et al., 2017).Such autonomous, emergent initiatives are highly relevant for strategy making (Burgelman, 1983) and past research has shown that the ability to integrate them is associated with higher innovation portfolio success (Kaufmann et al., 2020).As bootlegging activities are decoupled from the formal innovation process, they are more likely to lack alignment with the organizational program activities and to explore new directions (Criscuolo et al., 2014;Kanter, 2000).The initiation of bootleg projects allows the elaboration of ideas within the organization while minimizing the risk of premature rejection due to their fuzziness, innovativeness, lack of strategic fit, or because feasibility cannot be initially demonstrated (Augsdorfer, 2005(Augsdorfer, , 2008;;Cheng & Van de Ven, 1996;Koch & Leitner, 2008;Masoudnia & Szwejczewski, 2012).As such innovation activities are not part of the formal innovation process, ideas developed through bootlegging also get less feedback from the organization.Feedback has also been shown to lead to thinking along conventional and well-known paths (Smith, 2003) whereas the generation of radically new ideas is more likely without feedback (George, 2007).Furthermore, bootlegging allows for experimentation and exploration in different directions without the psychological pressure from managers to deliver results (Augsdorfer, 2008;Masoudnia & Szwejczewski, 2012).This enables to explore less conventional paths, even if the outcomes are less certain, and the effort invested into elaborating the potential of ideas increases the likelihood that they may enter new markets with substantial opportunity for development, i.e., are of higher innovativeness (Gamber et al., 2021).The lack of officially assigned resources requires the procurement of resources from alternative sources (Globocnik & Salomo, 2015).This resource constraint can also facilitate the generation of radically new ideas by motivating the search for alternative materials and less obvious approaches (Amabile et al., 1996;Kannan-Narasimhan, 2014).
Although other factors also contribute to the successful implementation of new products and processes, it is reasonable to assume that organizations showing a stronger tendency to bootlegged innovation activities will increase the number of bootlegged outcomes, which, as argued above, are more innovative than the outcomes of the formal innovation process (Mainemelis, 2010).Organizations with a stronger bootlegging tendency should thereby exhibit an innovation portfolio of greater newness.Thus, we suggest, Hypothesis 6. Organizations with higher levels of bootlegging tendency show higher innovation portfolio newness.
The overall proposed model is depicted in Figure 2.

| Data collection and sample
Our hypotheses were tested using data collected from a cross-sectional industry sample of Austrian and German firms.To recruit participants, we used membership lists of intermediaries, industry associations, and conferences, as these sources provided specific contact data to invite qualified participants which are not available through other secondary sources.Executives and senior managers were approached with an invitation to participate with their organization in a study encompassing a wide range of innovation management practices and activities.Those interested in participating in the study were asked to nominate a set of employees regularly involved in innovation activities.An individual invitation to an online survey was sent to each of the nominated employees.This survey included, among others, the items to the constructs investigated in this study.Absolute anonymity of the provided data was ensured throughout the entire process.Neither the executives nor the employees were explicitly briefed in the invitation and the survey about the study's focus on bootlegging to avoid sample selection bias and social desirability bias triggered by the deviant nature of this behavior and its potentially associated negative consequences.
In total, 136 organizations participated in the study.The final sample used for further analysis included 930 respondents from 124 organizations (an average of 7.5 informants per organization).An overview of the sample's characteristics is provided in Table 1.The final sample size exceeds the recommended one drawing on statistical power analysis (Cohen, 1992;Hair et al., 2018) which proposes at least 101 cases to detect R 2 values ≥ 0.25 when considering a 5% probability of error, the commonly used level of statistical power of 80%, and the most complex model with 16 predictors explaining the dependent variable.Non-response bias was also assessed by comparing early (first quantile) and late responding organizations (last quantile) as a proxy for non-responding firms (Armstrong & Overton, 1977).The results of the performed t-tests did not indicate any significant differences in the core constructs and, thus, nonresponse bias is unlikely to be an issue.With respect to the multi-respondent data, we collected the responses for all constructs from all participating informants.For subsequent analysis, however, we only used the responses from the highest ranked individual in the organization, who is likely to have the best overview over portfolio outcome and thereby the most suitable information source for our newness of innovation portfolio variable.We used responses from employees without management responsibilities and team leaders for the bootlegging variable as this behavior is most likely shown at these levels.Responses from middle and upper managers were used for the managerial measures as these levels predominate in determining and managing them and thereby the preferred information source for their evaluation.For assessing the environmental turbulence, the responses of all respondents were used as respondents are all exposed to their organizational environment.

| Measures
We used multi-item measures and a five-point Likerttype scale ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 5 (fully agree) for all core constructs.Established and validated measures were used where possible.The development of new scales closely followed prior research.To avoid potential method bias, we followed recommendations of past literature (Chang et al., 2010;Podsakoff et al., 2003Podsakoff et al., , 2012)): (i) we use data on independent, mediation, and dependent variables from different sources, as delineated before; (ii) psychological separation was implemented by disguising the actual focus of the study and framing it as a broad assessment of the innovation system and behaviors in the organization to reduce the salience of the investigated linkage; (iii) proximal separation was implemented by asking for other unrelated innovation practices and activities in between the scales used in this research to increase the distance between the measures; (iv) ambiguity of the measures was eliminated by conducting two pre-tests with employees from 20 organizations to assess the content validity of the developed scales and if they are uniformly understood, which resulted in minor wording adaptions; (v) we only used fact-based statements to which respondents could answer, concerning which described characteristic of an organization applies to their organizational context, which are also associated with less bias caused by social desirability and anchor effects.
As we investigate managerial practices broadly implemented across the organization and the overall tendency within an organization for bootlegging, the constructs we investigate are located at the organizational level of analysis.We also considered this in the scale selection and development process by applying the referentshift consensus composition model (Chan, 1998).This requires the items to be phrased in such a way that the respondents assess activities and behaviors of their organization as a whole and not their own individual activities and perceptions, which is achieved by shifting the referent of the content in the items from the self to the organization.For instance, this is achieved by asking respondents about the extent they agree to the statement "In our company, employees are encouraged to take calculated risks for their ideas" or "Here we are able to experiment around with ideas that lie outside the projects we mainly work on," which refer to the organization and not to the specific individual (which would be, e.g., "I am encouraged to take calculated risks" or "Here I am able to experiment with ideas that lie outside the projects I mainly work on").Specifying the organization as the referent is crucial, as the referent shift ensures that organizational practices and behaviors are assessed, even if the individual is less exposed to or engaged in them as opposed to most others in the organization.To assess if the referent-shift was implemented appropriately, the scales have to achieve within-group consensus.Ex-post, we statistically assessed this using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) (1,k), which informs about the inter-rater reliability and interrater agreement.With the ICC (1,k) values between 0.46 and 0.91, the agreement was considered moderate to strong (LeBreton & Senter, 2008) suggesting that referent-shift to the organizational level was properly implemented.
The newness of the innovation portfolio was evaluated adapting the scale of Schultz, Salomo, and Talke (2013).The two dimensions "product/service innovativeness" comprised seven, and "process innovativeness" four items on whether the organization launched or introduced innovations that changed or created new markets and drew on new technologies that make existing ones obsolete.Together, the two dimensions build the overall degree of innovativeness at a superordinate level.All items refer to the innovation outcomes produced within the previous 3 years.Bootlegging tendency was captured with four items drawing on prior items used by Criscuolo et al. (2014) and Globocnik and Salomo (2015).Three items stemming from a scale of Criscuolo et al. (2014) assessing whether ideas outside the main projects are explored, self-initiated projects are pursued, and time is committed to unofficial projects.The remaining other two original items referred to the flexibility and autonomy at work rather than bootlegging behavior and were therefore not included.Two additional items drawing on prior work of Globocnik and Salomo (2015) were used to further capture the deviant nature (i.e., without approval, gather own resources) and thereby differentiate better from permitted bootlegging.The original items asked for the absolute frequency of projects that were started without approval and how often own resources were gathered.For our scale, we re-formulated the items into statements.Since all these items were originally developed to capture individual bootlegging behavior, they were transposed to capture the tendency of employees within the focal organization to show this behavior by shifting the referent from the individual to the organization (Chan, 1998) as explained above.The availability of an idea management system was assessed with six items drawing on the conceptual ideas of El Sherbiny and Abdel Aziz (2014) capturing whether the organization has a systematic process to motivate employees to generate ideas, to manage submissions, and to process idea evaluation and selection.Management support was determined with five items from Hornsby et al. (2002) assessing whether managers support their employees in their innovation activities.In particular, the scale reflects managers' commitment to support their employees' innovation activities even during critical periods, encouraging employees to take risks, and the support of experimental projects of employees realizing that some will certainly fail.Formal innovation strategy was queried through four items from Cooper et al. (2004aCooper et al. ( , 2004b) ) and Bart and Pujari (2007).These items inform on whether the innovation strategy is clearly defined (e.g., markets, technologies, product areas), is formally documented, and well communicated in the organization.Six items drawing on Kleinschmidt et al. (2007) were used to query senior management involvement.They inform on the degree to which senior management has a leading role in innovation projects regarding their initiation, selection, portfolio decision-making, evaluation, and internal marketing.
Firm size, innovation process formality, industry differences, and country were included as additional covariates in the model to control for potential effects of firm characteristics and the environment.As the application level of formal management practices and resources necessary to realize innovation may be affected by firm size, we added the number of employees as a proxy for firm size to the model.The absolute values were transposed into a variable with six categories to avoid biases caused by extreme outliers.Innovation process formality, assessed with four items from Schultz et al. (2013), captured whether the organization follows a formal stageand-gate-type process for realizing innovation projects with defined activities and clear decision points.To account for potential industry differences, dummy variables for the major sectors manufacturing, industrial engineering, and utilities were integrate into the model.Furthermore, the market and technological environment in which the organization is embedded might affect innovation activities.Thus, we integrated market and technology turbulence, each captured with three indicators from Calantone et al. (2003) and Venkatraman (1989).Finally, another dummy variable captured potential country differences because activities may be caused by crosscultural and infrastructure differences.

| Properties of the scales
The applied measures were tested for validity and reliability.First, we analyzed the measures for the independent variables and the multi-item controls with the data collected from middle and upper managers.To assess the internal consistency, Cronbach's alpha coefficients were calculated, which ranged at satisfactory levels between 0.68 and 0.96.Principal component analyses (varimax rotation), which were conducted separately for each construct's items, extracting only one factor with eigenvalues greater than one, demonstrating these items' unidimensionality (Hair et al., 2018).We then further analyzed the convergence validity using confirmatory factor analysis including all constructs and their items collected from middle and upper managers.All factor loadings were >0.50 and significant, supporting indicator reliability.The average variance extracted from all independent variables of the main model was ≥0.50, and the composite reliability scores were ≥0.70.Discriminant validity was further determined by the result that each constructs' square root of the average variance extracted was larger than the highest correlation with all the other latent variables (Fornell & Larcker, 1981).The comparative fit index (CFI = 0.94) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA = 0.040) were within the recommended boundaries (Hu & Bentler, 1998) and were also supported by a χ 2 /df ratio of 2.64.Although in subsequent regression analysis we use data from different respondents for each step of the mediation model, the survey distributed to middle and upper managers included all items-also on bootlegging and innovativeness of the portfolio-and were assessed at the same time, which represents a risk for potential common method bias.Thus, we conducted Harman's single factor test including all items collected from middle and upper managers.Explorative factor analysis extracted seven factors with eigenvalues greater than one are extracted, which together explained for 70.4% of the variance, whereas the largest factor accounts for only 26.8%.Due to prior critic on this test regarding its ability to uncover common method bias, we further applied the unmeasured latent variable technique recommended by Podsakoff et al. (2003Podsakoff et al. ( , 2012)).We extended the specified correlation model in the confirmatory factor analysis by adding a latent common method variance factor, and all items were allowed to load on their corresponding construct as well as the latent method factor.This allows to partition the variance in the items into trait, method, and random error.If such a common method factor exists, the model fit is better than the original model without the latent method factor.However, the fit of the extended model (χ 2 /df = 2.54; p < 0.001; CFI = 0.94; RMSEA = 0.038) did not improve as the changes in the fit indices (Δχ 2 /df = 0.10; ΔCFI = À0.004;ΔRMSEA = 0.002) were below the values that indicate a more parsimonious model, i.e., an increase in CFI ≥ 0.02 (Vandenberg & Lance, 2000); decrease of RMSEA ≥ 0.015 (Chen, 2007).The squared unstandardized factor loading of the items on the unmeasured latent method factor is 0.14, which is clearly below the threshold of 0.25.When comparing the loadings of the items on their corresponding latent constructs between the two models, the highest decrease of the loading observed was ≤0.13, which is also below the common threshold of 0.20.Thus, the results indicate that common method bias does not appear to have substantial impact in this research.The items and CFA-results are reported in Appendix Table A1.
Next, we analyzed the measures for the mediator and the controls on environmental turbulence with the data collected from employees without management responsibility and team leaders.Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged between 0.68 and 0.83 supporting, internal consistency.Separate principal component analyses for each construct's items also supported their unidimensionality (Hair et al., 2018).Confirmatory factor analysis resulted in significant factor loadings >0.50, composite reliability scores ≥0.70, and average variance extracted scores ≥0.50 for all constructs except market turbulence (0.43).Discriminant validity was also supported.The χ 2 /df ratio of 2.21, the CFI of 0.98, and the RMSEA of 0.034 were also within the recommended boundaries.For the same reason outlined before, we assessed potential common method bias.Harman's single factor test resulted in three factors with eigenvalues greater than one explaining 66.5% of the variance and the largest factor accounts for only 27.7%.Unmeasured latent variable technique implemented in CFA did not indicate common method bias either.The fit of the model including the latent common method variance factor (χ 2 /df = 2.11; p < 0.001; CFI = 0.98; RMSEA = 0.033) did not improve (Δχ 2 / df = À0.75;ΔCFI = À0.003;ΔRMSEA = 0.001), the squared unstandardized factor loading of the items on the unmeasured latent method factor is 0.13, and the highest decrease of a loading observed was ≤0.14.Details on items and the results of CFA are summarized in Appendix Table B1.
The dependent variable "newness of the innovation portfolio" was assessed by the highest senior manager for each organization.For the two-dimensional construct, principal component analysis also extracted the proposed two dimensions, which in turn formed one higher-order factor supporting that they reflect different dimensions of the overarching phenomenon innovativeness.Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged between 0.82 and 0.89 at acceptable levels.In addition, we applied confirmatory factor analysis to support the nature of the degree of innovation as a second-order construct.The overall model showed acceptable fit (χ 2 /df = 3.64; p < 0.001; CFI = 0.87; RMSEA = 0.05).The alternative model specifying the newness as a unidimensional construct resulted in less optimal model fit (χ 2 /df = 4.23; p < 0.001; CFI = 0.84; RMSEA = 0.06), supporting the original twofactor structure.Items and results of CFA are reported in Appendix Table C1.
Finally, we aggregated the individual responses to organizational-level scores to prepare main model analysis.The aggregated scores represent the organization's managerial practices (including the control innovation  process formality) assessed by middle and upper managers, organizational bootlegging tendency assessed by employees and team leaders, innovativeness of the innovation portfolio assessed by a senior manager, and environmental turbulence assessed by all respondents.
Table 2 provides an overview on the means, standard deviations, correlations, and Cronbach's alpha scores of the constructs entering model analysis.

| RESULTS
The proposed hypotheses were tested through a set of ordinary least square regression analyses.First, we analyzed the relationship between the investigated managerial practices and bootlegging tendency (Table 3).In Model 1, which includes only the covariates, higher technological turbulence (β = 0.21; p = 0.03) is shown to be related to bootlegging tendency.In Model 2, the four managerial innovation practices were added to the regression model.Senior management involvement (β = À0.26;p = 0.005) has a significant negative relationship to bootlegging tendency, whereas management support (β = 0.30; p < 0.001) and idea management system (β = 0.21; p = 0.03) positively relate to bootlegging tendency.Formal innovation strategy shows no significant relationship to bootlegging tendency (β = À0.08;p = 0.47) after adding the new predictors to the model.The data lend support to Hypothesis 1 and 2, but lead us to reject Hypotheses 3 and 4. Hypothesis 5, which proposed the positive effects of idea management systems and management support to be stronger than the effects of the inducing management practices is supported by the data.In total, the model explains 32% (Adj.R 2 = 0.24; F = 4.26; p < 0.001) in the variance of the dependent variable, with the significant managerial practices increasing the explained variance in bootlegging tendency by 14% (ΔF = 5.59; p < 0.001).
Ex post analysis of the regression models following recommendations from Hair et al. (2018) shows multicollinearity not to be an issue, as the highest variance inflation index of 5.88 in one industry dummy variable does not exceed the common threshold of 10.The normal distribution of the residual of the regression variate (skewness = 0.12; kurtosis = À0.40;Shapiro-Wilk Test: p = 0.41) and the results of the White-test (p = 0.18) indicate no heteroscedasticity issues and support the notion that the regression results can be meaningfully interpreted.Hypothesis 6 was tested through a further set of regression models with the newness of the innovation portfolio as the dependent variable (Table 4).The results of Model 1, which only includes the covariates, show a positive relationship of technological turbulence (β = 0.27; p = 0.004) with the newness of the innovation portfolio.Furthermore, the newness increases with management support (β = 0.18; p = 0.039) and idea management system (β = 0.22; p < 0.021).In Model 2, the organization's bootlegging tendency is added to the model.The results show that higher bootlegging tendency positively affects the newness of the innovation portfolio (β = 0.46; p < 0.001), which supports Hypothesis 6.The significant relations of the other management practices diminish once bootlegging tendency is added to the model.In total, the model explains 47% (Adj.R 2 = 0.41; F = 7.44; p < 0.001) in the variance of the dependent variable, with bootlegging tendency increasing the explained variance in the newness of the innovation portfolio by 14% (ΔF = 29.71;p < 0.001).
Ex post analysis demonstrates that none of our models present multicollinearity issues (highest variance inflation index = 6.15 of one industry dummy variable), violations of normality in the residual of the regression variate (skewness = 0.23; kurtosis = À0.20;Shapiro-Wilk test: p = 0.47) or heteroscedasticity issues (White test p = 0.17), allowing for a meaningful interpretation of the regression results.
In addition, we investigated the mediation effects of the management practices on newness of the innovation portfolio through bootlegging tendency.Therefore, we ran mediation analysis using PROCESS (Hayes, 2018) with 5000 bootstrap subsamples to assess the significance of the direct and indirect effects.In total, four mediation analyses were performed, one for each of the four investigated management practices.The results are summarized in Table 5.
The 95% confidence interval of the indirect effect of senior management involvement on newness of the innovation portfolio through bootlegging excludes zero (lower bound = À0.259;upper bound = À0.061) and thereby the indirect effect is significant (B = À0.15;SE = 0.05).The direct effect is not significant (B = 0.04; SE = 0.09; CI = [À0.148;0.223]), indicating a full mediation.Regarding formal innovation strategy, we have already shown the lack of a significant relationship with ).Finally, the effect of idea management system on the newness of the innovation portfolio is supported to be fully mediated through bootlegging with the direct effect being not significant (B = 0.12; SE = 0.08; CI = [À0.031;0.266]) and the indirect effect being significant (B = 0.10; SE = 0.04; CI = [0.025;0.175]).

| DISCUSSION
With this research, we join the conversation on how to enact planned emergence through shaping organizations' bootlegging tendency for organizational innovation.Drawing on the theory of creative deviance, we empirically tested the proposed model with multi-respondent data collected from 930 employees in 124 organizations.
Our findings suggest that bootlegging tendency of organizations can be seen as a relevant path to planned emergence: With the help of common managerial innovation practices, the bootlegging tendency in an organization can be intentionally regulated and thereby "planned".Furthermore, a stronger bootlegging tendency can contribute to organizational renewal and innovation, manifested in its positive association with the newness of the innovation portfolio.
From a broader perspective, we locate our first contribution in the discussion of how to enact planned emergence in strategy, innovation, and portfolio management.The concept of planned emergence recognizes the need of employees' autonomous innovation initiatives to successfully realize strategies in an agile manner that allow to act on new opportunities unfolding during strategy implementation.This view contrasts approaches of formal strategic planning drawing on long-term macro-level analysis and implementation control (Cunha & Cunha, 2006).To address the need to further explore how to enact planned emergence, past portfolio management research has identified emergent strategy recognition, i.e., the identification of patterns in emerging elements in project portfolios, as driver of project portfolio success (Kopmann et al., 2017).Here, portfolio management as a sensing mechanism integrates emergent initiatives into portfolio and strategy.However, research remains vague on how to "plan" for organizational behavior creating this necessary input.Only recently, informal approaches to innovation were linked to the concept of planned emergence (Grant, 2003).In particular, bootlegging was proposed as potential enabler providing the emergent input that could allow for the identification of emergent patterns (Kopmann et al., 2017;Martinsuo & Geraldi, 2020).Augsdorfer (1996) finds that bootlegging is a practice common in the majority of investigated companies, with widespread participation of employees in such projects.Therefore, it is surprising that research has not further investigated factors facilitating the organizational bootlegging tendency.In particular, as such enacted planned emergence bears the potential of substantial renewal of organizations' innovation portfolio.Our research addresses this gap in the literature and expands our knowledge with respect to the effect of a set of common innovation management practices on bootlegging tendency of the organization.We identify idea management systems and encouragement for innovation by management as relevant mechanisms, whichintentionally or not-foster employees' emergent innovation initiatives.Idea management systems do not only motivate more employees to submit high-quality ideas and to engage in compliant innovative behavior (Frese et al., 1999;Kruft & Kock, 2021), but also to engage in bootlegging.Similarly, management support for innovation, which is associated with higher front-end effectiveness and efficiency (Kock et al., 2015) is also related with higher bootlegging tendency.Contrary to expectations, we find that innovation management practices inducing innovation initiatives, albeit giving them a clear direction on which innovation areas to focus, have no or even an opposite effect on the bootlegging tendency.In fact, the personal involvement of senior managers in the definition, assessment, and selection of specific innovation projects reduces bootlegging tendency in the organization.One reason might be that the personal intervention of senior managers in the organization's innovation activities increases the saliency of deviance inherent in bootlegging.Normbreaking may go along with increased concerns of potential negative sanctions among innovation-pursuing employees, when following ideas outside the scope personally defined by senior managers through social interaction with employees (Kuratko et al., 2005;Yuan & Woodman, 2010).A further reason might be that stronger senior management involvement might come along with tighter monitoring of resources, making it more difficult in the organization to gather or divert organizational resources for bootleg activities.Furthermore, a formal innovation strategy, which promotes innovation goals and defines target innovation areas through institutional means, appears not to be related with bootlegging tendency.It seems that the defined innovation areas do not increase the structural strain by allocating resources to particular projects and thereby limiting the resources for free idea elaboration.Neither does the formal definition of target innovation areas create a situation in which the deviance of following ideas outside the innovation program becomes more salient.We postulate the generation and elaboration of an increased number of ideas as conductive to planned emergence.As such, our findings suggest that innovation management practices facilitating employee's innovative behavior without providing specific innovation directions are more appropriate whereas practices inducing specific target areas are rather detrimental.
Secondly, we contribute to the ongoing controversial discussion as to whether bootlegging should be perceived as an unfavorable or favorable behavior.In particular, we propose bootlegging tendency as offering the potential to increase highly innovative outcomes.Some researchers take a negative posture because performance might be hampered due to the deviation of work time from assigned tasks and the diversion of resources from their intended purpose (Kanter, 2000;Roussel et al., 1991).Others argue that bootlegged projects always benefit the organization, even if it is just a learning outcome (Augsdorfer, 1996(Augsdorfer, , 2005)).The majority of bootleg projects also seem to result mainly in incremental improvements rather than radical innovations (Augsdorfer, 2005) although anecdotal evidence on some breakthrough innovations achieved through bootlegging suggests otherwise (Leicht-Deobald & Lins, 2017).Furthermore, from a managerial perspective, framing bootlegging as desirable goes against common management conventions.It appears difficult to argue that an employee behavior questioning the relevance of formal control and violating organizational rules and norms should have positive outcomes.To investigate the potential of bootlegging to renew the organization, we deviate from prior research and took an organizational level perspective to study the phenomenon and its outcomes that goes beyond anecdotal evidence of singular events (Leicht-Deobald & Lins, 2017) or focused a specific set of bootlegged projects (Augsdorfer, 2005), or investigated HR-related performance of business units (Criscuolo et al., 2014).
By studying the relationship between bootlegging as a behavioral tendency in the organization and the newness of the organization's innovation portfolio, this is the first study to the best of our knowledge that is able to provide empirical evidence for a positive association of bootlegging with innovativeness.Nevertheless, this fits the argument of the literature on planned emergence that suggests that a strict focus on realizing the deliberate strategy may hinder innovation (Maniak & Midler, 2014).Emergent initiatives initiated through bootlegging could be complementary to deliberate top-down strategy processes to enhance organizational innovation and renewal (Grant, 2003).Following a similar line of argument, portfolio management literature reports that emergent strategy recognition results in higher portfolio success, i.e., balanced, efficient, and commercially successful portfolios (Kaufmann et al., 2020;Kopmann et al., 2017).Our research provides complementary evidence, suggesting that organizations can benefit from bootlegging, which provides the input for emergent strategies striving for higher innovativeness.Our findings are also consistent with prior research on radical innovation, which realized that highly innovative projects require less formalized innovation processes, or their avoidance altogether (McDermott & O'Connor, 2002), to overcome internal barriers such a preference of the status quo and risk aversion (Smith & Tushman, 2005).In particular, secrecy manifested in concepts such as satellite exploration structures (O'Connor & McDermott, 2004), skunkworks (Donada et al., 2021), and bootlegging (Criscuolo et al., 2014) has been emphasized by several studies as key to overcome such barriers and thereby fostering radical developments.Similarly, previous studies at the individual level report employee motivation to "go underground" is often associated with finding ways to overcome the organization's innovation inertia, ideas' lack of strategic fit, and issues with highly innovative ideas for which potential and feasibility have not been demonstrated yet (e.g., Koch & Leitner, 2008;Masoudnia & Szwejczewski, 2012).Consequently, we support that organizations in which bootlegging becomes a widespread approach among employees to innovation are also the ones more likely to achieve a higher innovativeness of their overall innovation portfolio.
In addition, our research offers important contributions to the theory of creative deviance which proposes, in more general terms, that management measures promoting innovation goals and activities increase strain and thereby creative deviance.Our findings suggest that this proposition only seems to hold for management measures that do not provide concrete direction for employees on which innovation areas to pursue, whereas measures to facilitate induced innovation initiatives have no or even a negative effect on creative deviance.Whereas past research has primarily applied this theory to explain individual behavior, we provide the first empirical evidence for its main assumptions at the organizational level, particularly for the proposition that this behavior results in more innovative outcomes.With these findings we also contribute to the bootlegging literature by introducing an organization-level perspective on this behavior and providing a better understanding on which organizational measures increase the general tendency to engage in bootlegging in an organization.This goes beyond explanations of past research that primarily focused the individual bootleg employees, their dispositions, and job contexts (e.g., Globocnik & Salomo, 2015;Lin et al., 2016;Tenzer & Yang, 2019).

| MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS
The findings of our study hold several practical implications for managers.Managers may consider developing a more positive posture toward bootlegging.Even if bootlegging is difficult to regulate and goes against organizational norms, this tendency is an indicator that employees have internalized the organization's innovation goals and strive for achieving them.Furthermore, it helps the organization to overcome inertia and biases that sometimes inhibit pursuing more radical ideas and ultimately results in achieving a higher degree of newness of the innovation portfolio.Bootlegging should be seen as a mean that enables "planned emergence" that complements managers' deliberate strategy and planning activities and enables a more flexible response to changes of the environment.In addition, for this complementary stream of innovative outcomes, the organization does not need to allocate resources dedicated to fund these informal innovation activities or to provide free time to employees to elaborate their own ideas.From this perspective, bootlegging not only enhances innovative outcomes but offers an efficient approach to further improve the innovation portfolio of organizations.
Our findings also inform managers on the need to perceive bootlegging as an (unintended) by-product when they implement measures that support the emergence of innovation initiatives from employees.The more they invest into practices that communicate that innovation is desired by the organization and support employees to create and communicate their own ideas, the more ideas compete for further funding.More ideas result in a lower proportion of ideas that the organization can realize with available official resources, and a higher bootlegging tendency can be expected.Managers need to interpret this as a signal of their management practices to work rather than fail in stimulating innovation.Idea management systems and encouraging employees in following new ideas are important to stimulate corporate innovation and renewal.In such an organizational context, particularly employees with higher risk propensity, creativity, and self-efficacy who are more inclined to engage in bootlegging behavior (Augsdorfer, 2012;Globocnik, 2019;Globocnik & Salomo, 2015) can be expected to engage in said behavior.
However, excessive bootlegging might hamper the effectiveness and efficiency of managers' attempts to coordinate the innovation activities of employees, both strategically and operationally (Kanter, 2000;Roussel et al., 1991).Based on our findings, senior managers who get personally involved into innovation activities can reduce the bootlegging tendency in their organization.Thus, senior managers can deploy measures to regulate bootlegging and thereby prevent that "let[ting] a thousand flowers bloom can result in a garden full of weeds" (Criscuolo et al., 2014(Criscuolo et al., , p. 1289)).

| LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH
This study investigated conditions and outcomes of bootlegging tendency in organizations, but there are several limitations that provide opportunities for future research.First, further factors in the internal environment of an organization might affect how the investigated innovation management practices influence the bootlegging tendency in the organization.For instance, the availability of organizational slack-resources that exceed the minimum required for an organization to produce its desired outcomes (Nohria & Gulati, 1996)might affect the physical abilities of employees to engage in more or less bootlegging.The relative emphasis placed on the organizational innovation goal and the conformity to organizational norms might also affect whether the management practices to facilitate innovative outcomes also result in more or less bootlegging (Mainemelis, 2010).Similarly, organizational culture might affect the relationship between management practices to facilitate innovation initiatives and bootlegging tendency.Drawing on the competing values framework, (Cameron & Quinn, 2006), internal oriented archetypes such as clan cultures that emphasize loyalty, tradition, and participation as well as hierarchy cultures that rely on formal rules and policies might provide a less favorable context for bootlegging because the deviance goes strongly against the norms prevailing in these organizational cultures.In contrast, employees' illegitimate means to realize innovation might be better accepted or even appreciated in externally oriented cultures, such as market cultures, with their strong goal and competitive orientation, and adhocracy cultures with their focus on creativity and entrepreneurship.
Second, this study focused on the newness of the innovation portfolio as the outcome of bootlegging tendency as our interest was placed on whether bootlegging might support organizations in coping with barriers to more innovative portfolios.However, future research might investigate whether bootlegging also results in higher economic innovation performance in terms of revenue growth, profit margin, and market share.This would shed light on the still controversially discussed question whether bootlegging in organizations should be labeled as favorable or unfavorable.
Third, future research might investigate further contingency factors that might affect the relationships uncovered in this research.For instance, the business focus of the organization might be an interesting starting point.Service innovations are characterized by less formality, with front-line employees taking over large parts of service innovation initiation and implementation, and more customization to the needs of specific customers (e.g., Storey et al., 2016).These characteristics might make bootlegging even more likely, and increase its relevance for performance, as informal innovation activities could allow to quickly realize service innovation when identifying an opportunity.Nonetheless, this might also difficult the realization of a strategically planned and coordinated service innovation implementation thereby hampering performance.Furthermore, innovation portfolio characteristics not considered in this research might be of relevance for the emergence and effectiveness of bootlegging in organizations.For instance, organizations with less high-risk projects might have a higher tendency of bootlegging and thereby higher performance relevance of such activities, as it is the only strategy for such organizations to elaborate radically new ideas.A stronger focus of innovation activities on system innovations or products embedded in eco-systems with many links to existing market offerings and external partners might make it more difficult to engage in bootlegging activities and to produce valuable outcomes.Thus, future research could explore the role of further characteristics of the innovation portfolio for the emergence and effectiveness of the organization's bootlegging tendency.
Fourth, scholars (Kanter, 2000;Roussel et al., 1991) have identified the risk of self-organized innovation activities of employees cannibalizing the effectiveness of formal innovation processes.Future research might explore negative organizational consequences associated with higher bootlegging tendency, e.g., to which extent the effectiveness of the innovation system is undermined.Such an investigation would benefit from a longitudinal perspective to understand how negative effects unfold over time when bootlegging tendency increases.It is reasonable to believe that the more bootlegged outcomes emerge over time, formal control of innovation activities becomes less accepted by employees and thereby less effective in aligning their innovation behavior.Over time, a high bootlegging tendency could thereby result in less strategically aligned innovation portfolios and underutilized official innovation resources, as going through the formal innovation process and decision gates could become optional or in extreme cases an exception for employees for initiating and realizing innovation ideas.
Fifth, future research might approach the phenomenon of bootlegging from a multi-level perspective (Hitt et al., 2007;Molina-Azorín et al., 2020).Employees are embedded in nested hierarchies, e.g., in teams, which are part of departments, which are part of organizations, and these are grouped in industries or located in different geographies.Interactions across these different levels might further help to better understand the emergence and outcomes of bootlegging behavior at different levels.For instance, research might explore top-down how individual bootlegging behavior is affected by individual (lower level) and team or team leader characteristics (higher level).Another example would be to assess, bottom-up, how the bootlegging tendency within different departments depends on the characteristics of the departments, such as type of work (higher level), and individual attributes, such as experience or individual job design of its employees (lower level).Taking a multi-level perspective would allow us to gain a better understanding of bootlegging as a phenomenon embedded in a rich social context.
Regarding limitations related to the empirical methods of this research, we applied a cross-sectional study design that limits the ability to investigate causal effects.Furthermore, the results of the performed tests indicate that common method bias does not appear to be an issue in this research.However, when using ex-post assessments, such a bias cannot be ruled out entirely (Conway & Lance, 2010;Podsakoff et al., 2012).To resolve these issues, future research might apply a longitudinal or action research design to investigate how the introduction and variations of management practices facilitating emergent and induced innovation initiative impact the bootlegging tendency in organizations.With respect to the sampling approach, we have to acknowledge that although we approached a large number of firms and controlled for industry and firm characteristics in our model, there is still potential sampling bias caused by self-selection, and since we did not approach all organizations located in the two countries due to resource limitations, we could not draw on a full randomized sample.Future quantitative replication studies could resolve this issue to achieve better generalization of our findings.
Sample characteristics T A B L E 1 Mean, standard deviations, and correlation matrix T A B L E 2 Effects on newness of innovation portfolio T A B L E 4 T A B L E 5 Results of mediation effect test (PROCESS)