Why Decision-makers Differ In How They Assess Creative Ideas
RUNNING HEAD: A tale of two creativities
A tale of two creativities: Why decision-makers differ in how they assess creative ideas
Keywords: Creativity, implicit theories, innovation, bias, role theory
Abstract
Can decision-maker roles, roles with authority to fund a subset of ideas, shape the kinds of ideas people in those roles view as creative? Prior theory suggests that expertise alone should influence creativity assessments. Yet examples abound of experts in different roles disagreeing about whether the same idea is creative. We provide new theory and data to identify how and why decision-making roles might alter how people assess creative ideas. In a field study we show that decision-makers in an organization evaluate idea creativity differently than other organizational stakeholders. In a laboratory study we show that economic focus can shift the cues people use to determine whether an idea is creative. In a field study, we link the prior two studies to show that because decision-makers adopt an economic focus, they view cues to an ideas legitimacy as indicating creativity, whereas those with less decision-making responsibility and corresponding economic focus view legitimacy as indicating an idea lacks creativity. In sum, we integrate theory on accountability and creative idea recognition to provide a contextualized model of how decision-makers make creativity assessments in organizations.
This work has important implications for the literature on creativity and innovation and suggests one new interpretation of the longstanding puzzle of why organizations desire but often reject creative ideas.
Editor’s rejection of Akerlof’s “Market for Lemons” paper:
This is trivial.
Editor’s rejection of Orwell’s “Animal Farm:” It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.
The editors evaluating Orwell and Akerlof’s works did not think that those works were both new and appropriate—that is, creative. Orwell and Akerlof no doubt disagreed. Indeed, these authors had good reasons to disagree, since Akerlof’s paper won him the Nobel prize in economics, and Orwell’s book “Animal Farm” is an American classic. This phenomenon of people in decision-making roles disagreeing with others over whether an idea or product is creative seems too common not to be systematic. An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The
Innovators Enigma noted that Proctor and Gamble CEO Bob McDonald described ZzzQuil – a sleep aid medication branded as NyQuil without the cough medicine - as a breakthrough new product. The article noted that the CEO’s assessment of ZzzQuil being highly creative is puzzling because many competing sleep aid medications already existed in the marketplace, and furthermore, a portfolio manager described ZzzQuil as “derivative” and “incremental.” The article asked how two experts could have such different views of the same product.
The question of why decision-makers can sometimes view groundbreaking ideas as
“trivial” while at other times view ideas that are seemingly incrementally new as highly creative, is an unresolved puzzle. Learning how and why decision-makers disagree with others about what is creative is important, for several reasons. First, people tend to like and endorse ideas they
label as creative (Amabile, 1996; Elsbach & Kramer, 2003), so identifying how people with
decision-making authority assess creative ideas can provide a window into understanding why certain new ideas gain acceptance while others do not. Second, decision-makers perspective on creative ideas may be different from other important stakeholders in ways that create coordination errors and missed opportunities. For example, decision-makers can communicate to
employees that they desire them to generate creative ideas, yet may feel frustrated with employee generation efforts because they view fundamentally different kinds of ideas as creative relative to employees. Furthermore, decision-makers may view creativity differently from consumers and so miss market opportunities as research shows that consumers report greater intention to buy
ideas they view to be creative and therefore distinctive (Andrews & Smith, 1996; Buzzell &
Gale, 1987; Tian, Bearden, & Hunter, 2001).
Aside from the practical relevance of examining how decision-making roles might alter creativity assessments, identifying why decision-makers assess ideas differently presents an opportunity to advance theory in the literatures on creativity and innovation. The innovation literature currently recommends that organizations employ decision-making roles to ensure quality control and gate-keeping during the process of selecting ideas to pursue, with relatively little emphasis on how these decision-making roles themselves might alter judgments of ideas
examined these assessments without considering the broader social and organizational context of these judgments. Specifically, a pervasive feature of decision-making roles is the fact that people in these roles have the authority to fund ideas – and so have economic responsibility and accountability for their evaluations. Prior work has shown that having accountability can reinforce economic knowledge structures to aid in justifying decisions – structures which can
alter many aspects of judgment and choice decisions (Tetlock & Boettger, 1994). Hence, we
build theory to explain how decision-making roles can infuse a person’s perspective with an economic focus, and thereby shift how decision-makers assess creative ideas.
To build a contextualized model of creative idea recognition we integrate the literatures on accountability and creative idea recognition, literatures which to date have remained separate, to develop a new theoretical model identifying how organizational decision-making roles can shape creativity assessments in potentially maladaptive ways. Doing so allows us to resolve a tension described in the literature on the “liability of newness” which notes that because new
ideas are more uncertain, it is difficult to determine their legitimacy (Rao, Chandy, & Prabhu,
2008). This works suggests that decision-makers face a dilemma when needing to endorse ideas
that are both new and legitimate as new ideas tend to lack legitimacy, and highly legitimate ideas that tend to lack newness. However, we provide new theory to suggest that decision-makers can resolve this tension by altering their implicit beliefs or lay beliefs of what is creative, viewing legitimacy itself as a cue which indicates that something is creative. Importantly, people who are not in decision-making roles and so do not have a focus on economic accountability have implicit beliefs that when new ideas lack legitimacy and are seen as more creative.
We employ laboratory and field methodologies to develop a broader model of how organizational decision-makers assess creative ideas. Specifically, we provide data from an organization showing that decision-makers rate idea creativity differently than other stakeholders. Second, we employ a laboratory study to show, in a controlled setting, that economic schema can alter assessments of a creative idea. Third we link the laboratory and field study to show that decision-making roles can alter creativity assessments because they evoke an economic schema and so focus participants on evaluating a legitimate idea as highly creative, whereas those with less decision-making responsibility evaluate the same legitimate idea as relatively less creative. By examining how decision-making roles alter creativity assessments
using multiple methods and measures, we develop a contextualized theoretical model to suggest how people assess creative ideas in organizations.
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