ENT
Carl Horton
Columbia Business School, United States
Analexis Glaude
Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, United States
F Katelynn Boland
Columbia Business School, United States
Sahoon Kim
U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Justin Berg
U. of Michigan, Ross School of Business, United States
Carl Horton
Columbia Business School, United States
Analexis Glaude
Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, United States
“Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.” — Martin Luther King Jr. Scholars and practitioners have long recognized the importance of creativity and innovation in shaping management practices (Amabile, 1996; Birkinshaw et al., 2008), fostering organizational longevity (Heunks, 1998), and influencing decision-making (Chen et al., 2009; Damanpour, 2018; Staw, 1995). Success in many organizational contexts, from hiring to entrepreneurship, is driven by our ability to generate novel ideas, evaluate unconventional solutions, and implement innovative practices. To better understand these processes, this symposium presents four articles that collectively deepen our understanding of these phenomena. Each presentation contributes unique insights exploring related topics. These include how brainstorming sessions might be better structured to account for the differential effects of power, the intersectional effects of race and gender when evaluating a target’s creative abilities, whether rapid-feedback from AI has the potential to help entrepreneurs by fostering revision and higher quality ideas, and the ways social influence impacts our ability to “objectively” evaluate entrepreneurial ideas and predict creative success. In sum, this session lays the groundwork for important discussions and transformational advancements at the crossroads of creativity, organizational behavior, and management science. Presentations The first paper, "Low Power Warm-up Effect: Understanding the Effect of Power on Creativity over Time" by Sahoon Kim, Brian J. Lucas, and Jack A. Goncalo investigates the relationship between power dynamics and creativity. Building upon past research that shows how feeling less powerful can hinder creative expression due to a greater likelihood of conformity, they introduce the concept of a "low power warm-up effect." Specifically, they suggest that individuals with lower power can overcome initial creative disadvantages by engaging in creative tasks multiple times, eventually achieving creative parity with those in high-power positions. Three studies support this claim, revealing that while high-power individuals initially demonstrate greater creativity, low-power individuals catch up over time, with their creativity increasing more steeply across multiple rounds of a creative task. This work contributes to organizational literature on power, creativity, and brainstorming by demonstrating the dynamic effect of individual power on task performance over time, and by highlighting the rewarding nature of persistence for individuals in low-power states. The second paper, "The Intersection of Race and Gender on Creativity and Innovation" by Analexis A. Glaude, Merrick R. Osborne, and Sa-kiera T.J. Hudson, discusses the intersectionality of race and gender in the context of creativity and innovation. Specifically, they examine how perceptions of a target’s abilities differ by race, gender, and domain across three studies. Their results suggest that while perceptions of creativity and innovation play an important role in who gets hired or promoted, this role continues to depend upon race and gender. For example, all else equal, White men are perceived to be significantly more innovative than their peers. These findings illustrate the importance of taking an intersectional lens when seeking to develop better business practices. The third paper, “Feedback and Revision in Entrepreneurship: Comparing AI and Human Influence on the Willingness of Entrepreneurs to Revise” by Katie Boland, Rachel Jensen, and Sheena Iyengar delves into the challenges faced by entrepreneurs, highlighting the high failure rates of new businesses. They focus on how the psychological ownership entrepreneurs feel toward their ideas contributes to the persistence of suboptimal strategies, such as escalation of commitment and premature commitment to solutions. Broadly, their study aims to shed light on how the source of feedback, whether AI or human, influences entrepreneurs' willingness to revise and their emotional responses to feedback. Specifically, they explore the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a source of accessible, high-quality, rapid feedback for entrepreneurs—testing whether entrepreneurs revise their ideas at all based upon feedback from AI, and whether AI feedback may be less likely to threaten one’s sense of psychological ownership over an entrepreneurial idea. Indeed, preliminary results from their ongoing exploratory study suggest that entrepreneurs are more likely to revise their startup ideas when receiving feedback from AI compared to human sources. In the fourth paper, "Predicting Evaluations of Creative Ideas: Quantifying Social Influence" by C. Blaine Horton Jr. and Sheena S. Iyengar, the authors investigate how social influence affects perceptions of entrepreneurial ideas. Their study employs a "small world" design to illustrate the conditions under which social influence shapes evaluations of entrepreneurial creativity among quasi-experts (i.e., MBA students). Their studies confirm several key findings. For example, social influence increases agreement among evaluators, but blurs meaningful distinctions between creativity dimensions, and weakens correlations with expert judgment made by angel investors. Validating theory put forth in past research (Salganik et al., 2006), these effects appear to depend upon idea quality. While highly creative and non-creative ideas consistently succeed or fail across conditions, the success of ideas that would otherwise be considered average is largely explained by anchor effects. And yet, despite average ideas faring unpredictably well or poorly under social conditions, their outcomes are also more predictable with less data. For example, various regression models suggest that while an idea's “inherent creativity” explains roughly 27% of variance when considering group-level outcomes across conditions, anchor effects explain roughly 26% of additional variance. Collectively, these papers offer a multifaceted exploration of creativity and innovation, probing the social, temporal, and intersectional dimensions of these constructs. The symposium promises to spark insightful discourse on the importance of creativity and creative processes in management science and beyond.
Author: Sahoon Kim – U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Author: Brian J. Lucas – Cornell U.
Author: Jack Anthony Goncalo – U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Author: Analexis Glaude – Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Author: Merrick Osborne – Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Author: Sa-kiera Hudson – Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Author: F Katelynn Boland – Columbia Business School
Author: Rachel Jensen – Columbia Business School
Author: Sheena S. Iyengar – Columbia U.
Author: Carl Blaine Horton – Columbia Business School
Author: Sheena S. Iyengar – Columbia U.