When learning culture fails to reach everyone: work engagement and employee differences in innovative behaviour

Purpose This study revisits the relationship between organizational learning culture (OLC), work engagement (WE) and innovative work behaviour (IWB) by examining whether the benefits of learning culture are realized uniformly across employees. Building on the established OLC–WE–IWB framework, this study aims to investigate the role of WE as a mediating mechanism and to explore employee-level boundary conditions shaping the learning culture–innovation relationship. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected through a survey of 228 employees from organizations operating in Albania. Established multi-item measures were used to assess OLC, WE and IWB. Hypotheses were tested using regression-based mediation, moderation and moderated-mediation analyses. Exploratory analyses examined whether employee characteristics, including age, tenure, job position, gender and education, influenced the strength of the observed relationships. Findings Results indicate that OLC is positively associated with IWB and that WE serves as an important explanatory mechanism linking the two. Importantly, this relationship is not uniformly distributed across employees. Exploratory analyses suggest that learning culture is more strongly associated with innovative behaviour among younger, lower tenure and non-managerial employees, whereas its association is substantially weaker among more organizationally embedded groups. Originality/value Rather than proposing a new mechanism, this study demonstrates that a well-established learning culture–engagement–innovation relationship is unevenly realized across employee groups. The findings challenge assumptions of homogeneous learning-culture effects and suggest that the innovative benefits of learning-oriented practices depend on employee positioning within organizational structures.