The idea endorser’s dilemma: How status dynamics disincentivize creative idea endorsement

Abstract

Employees’ creative ideas often require managerial endorsement to be implemented. It is therefore important to understand factors that impact managers’ willingness to endorse their employees’ creative ideas. We investigate the role of social status dynamics and test two main hypotheses. First, we find managers lose more status for endorsing an idea that fails than they gain for endorsing an idea that succeeds (asymmetric status change hypothesis). Second, we find managers’ status gain for endorsing an idea that succeeds is smaller than the idea generating employee’s status gain, producing a status distance loss (status distance hypothesis). We characterize these findings as the idea endorser’s dilemma. Study 1 tested these hypotheses and Studies 2A-B tested boundary conditions of perceiver role and idea creativity. Study 3 investigated an attribution search mechanism, finding that the status change patterns were attenuated by a prompt that drew attention to the manager’s contributions. Study 4 found that managers are intuitively aware of these status dynamics and anticipate not only no status loss for rejecting an idea, but also a status distance gain over the employee whose idea they rejected. We discuss implications for creativity research and for implementing creative ideas in organizations.