Events

Ms. Rebekah Hong
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Maryland

Employee creativity—the generation of novel and useful ideas—is crucial for the growth and survival of organizations. In encouraging such creativity, organizations often reward employees who develop successful ideas for new products and services. As a result, employees are motivated to claim ownership over their specific creative ideas in order to get recognition for these ideas. However, I argue that such idea-claiming behaviors can be a double-edged sword as they can lead to negative perceptions by coworkers, negatively affecting coworkers’ willingness to work with the focal employee. Given that creativity is a social process, coworkers’ hesitancy to collaborate with the focal employee can put these employees’ creative careers at risk. Drawing from the Dual Perspective Model of social evaluation, I propose that while claiming ownership of creative ideas would lead to positive evaluations of the focal employee’s creative potential by their coworkers, it can also lead to coworkers perceiving such individuals as being territorial. In turn, these perceptions influence coworkers’ willingness to collaborate on subsequent creative projects with the focal employee. I then identify granting credit to others’ own ideas as a behavioral moderating factor that prompts coworkers to view one’s communication of idea ownership positively versus negatively. I propose a field study and one interactive team lab experiment and report results from the exploratory pilot study to explore this research question.