After economic restructure in 1986, Vietnam’s economy began to flourish and witnessed an impressive growth mainly due to the foreign investment influx from multinational corporations (MNCs), of which are IT companies. In the IT sector, creativity is known to have an important play but current research in Vietnam lacks empirical studies about factors influencing employee creativity within the IT industry. In reaction to this literature gap, the main purpose of this master’s thesis is to examine how task autonomy correlates with job innovativeness for IT MNCs in the local cultural context which is characterized by a high power distance and collectivism. To reach this goal, this thesis project has implemented a quantitative survey method to collect the primary data from a sample of 254 respondents who are presently employees of IT multinationals based in Vietnam. The SPSS results show that there is a statistically significant and positive relationship between autonomy and innovativeness for IT MNCs in Vietnam. Equally important, power distance is found to be a moderator in this association: high-scored power distance of Vietnam’s business and institutional environment weakens the above correlational link. As opposed to power distance, collectivism factor is proven not to establish any significant effect on the relationship between autonomy and creativity. Based on these empirical findings, the current thesis research not only provides managerial implications to practitioners but also contributes to the extant theoretical foundations and literature on creativity in organizational research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2
ABSTRACT 3
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES 5
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 6
1.1. Contextual Background 6
1.2. Research Question 7
1.3. Thesis Structure 7
CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 9
2.1. Job Innovativeness 9
2.2. Impact of Task Autonomy on Job Innovativeness 9
2.3. Moderating Effect of Cultural Factors 10
CHAPTER 3. METHODOLOGY 12
3.1. Conceptual Framework 12
3.2. Population and Sampling 12
3.3. Survey Design and Data Collection Procedure 12
3.4. Measures 12
CHAPTER 4. DATA ANALYSIS 13
4.1. Demographic Profile 15
4.2. Hypotheses Testing 17
CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS 21
5.1. Theoretical Contributions 21
5.2. Managerial Implications 21
5.3. Limitations for Direction for Future Research 22
REFERENCES 22
APPENDICES 26
Appendix 1. Survey Form 26
Appendix 2. Cronbach Outputs 29
Appendix 3. R-squared Changes 30

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