UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome Jing Zhou, Rice, to host a research seminar discussing  ‘Effects of power on the endorsement of creative ideas’.

Abstract

Powerful people have a large say in deciding whether creative ideas should be pursued. Yet, few studies have focused on how power influences an idea receiver’s endorsement of creative ideas. By integrating associative evaluation theory with insights from the power literature, we develop an associative evaluation account to predict that compared with those who experience little power, receivers who feel powerful will express stronger endorsement of ideas with high levels of creativity. Converging results obtained from three studies supported this hypothesis. In addition, Study 3 demonstrated that the idea generator’s status is a key boundary condition: Among the ideas submitted to a company’s suggestion program, compared with those who had little power, powerful employees expressed stronger endorsement only when the ideas had high levels of creativity and were generated by employees who had high network centrality.