Who will be on my side? The role of peers’ achievement motivation in the evaluation of innovative ideas

Abstract

Workplace innovations often take the form of making suggestions about small-range improvements, for example, of processes and work procedures. Research on innovation suggests that people holding a novel idea will often consult their peers first in order to gauge their potential approval and support before proposing the idea to formal decision makers. We argue that peer evaluators’ intentions to support an innovative idea depend on the idea’s capacity to satisfy or threaten the evaluator’s achievement motive. Support intentions will be higher if the idea satisfies the evaluators’ achievement motive (idea-motive congruence), and lower if it threatens their achievement motive (idea-motive incongruence); evaluators’ affective response is proposed to mediate this effect. Moreover, the intentions attributed to the idea presenter are proposed to affect peers’ support intentions. The results of two scenario-based experiments (N = 153 and 123) confirm that motive-incongruent implications of an innovative idea, in particular regarding their fear of failure, reduce the likelihood for peers’ support intentions. Results on affective responses were inconsistent across studies, whereas perceiving the idea presenter to hold prosocial intentions was positively related to idea support. Implications for the evaluation of ideas are discussed.

Keywords:

• idea evaluation
• innovation
• co-worker support
• achievement motive
• proactivity

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Dr Oliver Weigelt and Prof. Dr Bernd Marcus for their support in data collection for Study 1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Dual systems approaches to motive disposition theory differentiate between implicit and explicit motives. Implicit motives are subconscious and find expression in spontaneous behaviour or long-term development; explicit motives are self-attributed needs (therefore also referred to as values, e.g., in McClelland, 1985) which influence planned or “respondent” behaviour, such as decision-making (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989). Because of the latter, we focus on the explicit achievement motive in idea evaluation here.

2. We use the term “idea support” in all studies to refer to evaluators’ intention to support an idea. We are aware that we technically only assess support intentions, but we chose this terminology to avoid confusion with the attributed idea presenter intentions variables.

3. For reasons of clarity, the results for low activation positive and high activation negative affect are not presented in Tables 5 and 6. Indirect effects were not significant. We observed the same idea consequences x evaluator achievement motive interaction effect for high activation negative affect (β_S = –.30, p = .009; β_F = .28, p = .024) as described for low activation negative affect. However, this effect did not carry through to idea support (e.g., B_S = −0.16, SE = 0.14, p > .05) or probability of approval (e.g., B_S = –2.76, SE = 2.64, p > .05).