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, N=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, while perceiving the idea presenter to hold prosocial intentions was positively related to idea support. Implications for the evaluation of ideas are discussed.
