Journal of Organizational Behavior J. Organiz. Behav. 25, 217–234 (2004) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/job.239 Can we win them all? Benefits and costs of structured and flexible innovation– implementations ANAT DRACH-ZAHAVY 1 *, ANIT SOMECH 2 , MICHAL GRANOT 1 AND ADA SPITZER 1 1 Faculty of Health and Welfare, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel 2 Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Summary Bureaucratic job structuring was compared with person–job integration in an attempt to deter- mine which of the two approaches was a better means for innovation implementation in the workplace. The solution was hypothesized to be complex, depending on the criteria chosen for innovation effectiveness. Seventy incumbents of new linking roles in healthcare organizations were recruited. They provided data on the innovation–implementation approach applied in their case. Measures for different stakeholders’ perceptions of innovation effectiveness were gathered. Three colleagues of the incumbents provided performance appraisals, reflecting internal customers’ criteria for innovation effectiveness, each incumbent completed a ques- tionnaire about burnout as a reversed proxy of innovation effectiveness, and semi-structured observations of incumbents’ activities provided an index of the fit between their role behaviors and role requirements, reflecting external customers’ criteria for effectiveness. While perfor- mance appraisals were found to gain most from implementation through bureaucratic job structuring, the fit between incumbents’ role behaviors and role requirements benefited most from implementation through person–job integration. Decreased burnout required maximiz- ing the two implementation processes. These findings point to possible trade-offs between the different criteria for innovation effectiveness, and call for combining features from the two implementation processes to produce a superior implementation approach. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Introduction As change figures as the common future of today’s organizations, innovation has become the ‘indus- trial religion’ of the twenty-first century (West, 2000). There is substantial consensus that ‘innovation is power.’ Consequently, research has chosen to focus heavily on the individual, team, organization, and context enhancers that furnish opportunities for creativeness to sprout (for review, see Agrell & Gustafson, 1996; Brown & Eisenhardt, 1995; Montoya-Weiss & Calontone, 1994; West, 2002). Much less is known about the implementation processes of these creative ideas in the organization’s practice Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 13 June 2003 *Correspondence to: Anat Drach-Zahavy, Faculty of Health and Welfare, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel 31905. E-mail: anatdz@research.haifa.ac.il