Purpose – The role of Teacher Innovative Behavior (TIB), in responding to systemic problems in educational
systems and promoting “intrapreneurial” behavior has been recognized in recent times. A robust instrument
that can help administrators and teacher educators gauge the levels of TIB among their teachers will facilitate
the promotion of innovative behavior.
Design/methodology/approach – This study tested a multidimensional innovative behavior inventory
(IBI), innovation support inventory (ISI) and innovation output (IO) in a developing nation (India) context with
public school teachers (n 5 34,754), for reliability, validity, measurement invariance and structural invariance
across caste, gender and subject groups.
Findings – The IBI, ISI and IO showed good reliability and validity along with full measurement invariance at
configural, metric and scalar levels. With respect to the structural parameters, the inventories exhibited
invariance of factor variance and covariance, but not of factor means.
Practical implications – Teacher innovative behavior (TIB) is seen by developing country education
administrators as a tool to address difficult problems. With better measurement, it will be possible to identify
teachers who need training in creativity and entrepreneurial behavior, teachers who might have developed
innovative practices that could be used for teacher development, and ways of promoting competition among
teachers.
Originality/value – The study validates inventories, which were earlier tested in non-educational domains,
for use with public school teachers of a developing country across gender, caste and subject groups.