Based on research by Jing Zhou, Xiaoye May Wang, Davide Bavato, Stefano Tasselli and Junfeng Wu

• A creative manager is more likely to recognize a truly creative idea. 
• Managers, like consumers, favor ideas or products that are incremental.
• Managers need to be aware of these biases to boost their changes of spotting a creative idea or product when it appears. 

Would you recognize a brilliant idea if you were looking at it? And if you did, would you know what to do? The answer is more complex than it might seem.

A large and fast-growing sector of the U.S. workforce consists of "knowledge workers," whose jobs involve mental rather than physical labor. They do their work in an array of fields including marketing, biotechnology, engineering and computer technology. A surprising effort goes into enriching the value of these workers.

Wide-open office spaces, Wi-Fi-enabled bus rides to work, delicious (and free) victuals from the cafeteria: all reflect managers’ efforts to extract more value from their knowledge workers. Steve Jobs didn’t, after all, invent the iPhone. Rather, he recognized the value of the iPhone — which was created by Apple’s knowledge workers. 

It’s easy now to see what a revolutionary product the iPhone represented. But not all managers in Steve Jobs’ position would have been able to recognized its value. Now, in a groundbreaking review of four decades of research, Rice Business professor Jing Zhou and a team of collaborators have assembled guidelines for managers on the receiving side of creativity. The findings represent the first systematic review of literature about how decision-makers perceive worker creativity.

The main takeaways:

KNOW THYSELF. Product managers, designers and marketers should know that their own personal characteristics affect their ability to spot creativity and novelty. Bluntly put, if you are not especially creative, chances are you won’t naturally recognize or appreciate creativity when it flowers in front of you. “Decision-makers without any creating experience should be aware that they might downplay creativity or inaccurately forecast its success,” Zhou and her coauthors write. The characteristics and skills that propel a person into management do not, after all, necessarily include creativity. Yet a company’s bottom line may depend on a manager’s identification of creative and/or novel ideas. Luckily, certain techniques can help managers spot creative ideas. Cultivating an openness to experience, for example, correlates with the inclination to spot subordinates’ creative ideas.

DON’T BE SEXIST. Women’s ideas are routinely underrated (Luksyte et al., 2018; Proudfoot et al., 2015). Just as little Timmy gets called on by the teacher more frequently than young Susie in elementary school, adult Timmy is more likely to see his creative contributions recognized than mature Susie — even when their ideas are of the same quality. To get creative ideas recognized, Zhou’s team notes, it helps to be a man. In order to counteract this loss of talent, managers should know that women knowledge workers benefit from managers or organizations whose characteristics favor creativity. These organizations are often headed by leaders who are themselves charismatic and creative, such as Elon Musk at Tesla or the late Jobs at Apple (Sijbom, Janssen, & Van Yperen, 2015a). The lesson: take measures to value women knowledge workers before someone else does.

DON’T BE TOO CONSERVATIVE. Spotting a truly creative idea is one thing. Implementing it is something else entirely. Knowledge workers often intuitively understand that if they want their work to be recognized, it’s better to be on the leading edge than the bleeding edge. Researchers have confirmed this bias against highly novel or creative concepts through observation of lay people in controlled experiments, of experts and managers in organizational settings and of consumers facing purchasing decisions (Criscuolo et al., 2017; Hoeffler, 2003; Mueller et al., 2012). Consumers, too, are much more comfortable buying incrementally new products than really new products (Alexander, Lynch, and Wang, 2008). Think of the endless “Fast and Furious” movie franchise or the forever new-and-improved iterations of familiar sodas. As a manager, though, you should beware this tendency to favor incremental ideas. Scan the horizon instead for products or ideas that are truly novel. Warning: They will likely make you uneasy.

CREATE CREATIVITY. You many not think of yourself as a creative, but you are one. Managers, decision-makers and anyone else with power over a work environment are essential to the growth of new ideas. So cultivate a creative environment by encouraging self-awareness, gender respect and, above all, comfort with discomfort. Does your organization offer conditions for radical new ideas to sprout? Do you really want it to? Somewhere, another decision-maker does, and is clearing space for creativity to run wild.

Jing Zhou is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology ­– Organizational Behavior at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

To learn more, please see: Zhou, J., Wang, X. M., Bavato, D., Tasselli, S., & Wu, J. (2019). Understanding the receiving side of creativity: A multidisciplinary review and implications for management research. Journal of Management, 45(6), 2570-2595.

Some workers come up with new ideas by themselves, but actually doing something with their ideas is often a social process that requires support, collaboration and sponsorship. So a creative idea generally adds value to an organization only if it is recognized by others.

A new study by management experts at Rice University, Tsinghua University in Beijing, Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands and the University of Texas at Dallas reviews four decades of empirical research on the receiving side of creativity scattered across several business and social science fields. The study is published in in the Journal of Management.

Lead author Jing Zhou, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and her co-authors offer a framework that tells managers how they can build an environment in which creative ideas are spotted and utilized. “Idea generators can benefit from this body of knowledge in their efforts to make their work recognized by others,” they wrote.

First, the authors advise, new product managers, designers and marketers need to know that their personal characteristics will affect their ability to spot creativity and novelty. “Though one’s prior knowledge and experiences affect creativity recognition, one’s constructions of what creativity is (implicit theories of creativity) also color how creativity is perceived,” they write. “Decision-makers without any creating experience should be aware that they might downplay creativity or inaccurately forecast its success.”

Just as importantly, managers should foster an environment where new ideas are valued, recognized and implemented, the authors advise. “At the organizational level, having a culture in which innovation and creativity are valued facilitates creativity perception,” the authors wrote. “To enable idea implementation, managers need to provide resources and team leaders need to convey the message to the implementers that their endeavors are endorsed and supported by the organization and management.”

Scientists and artists, whose work needs to be recognized by a discerning audience, can in particular benefit from understanding the dynamics of how creativity is received, the authors said. “They need to know that (for example) women’s ideas are underrated and that creators who want to sell breakthrough innovation may encounter resistance, as people tend to prefer moderately new ideas or products that are only moderately incongruent,” the authors wrote. To level the playing field, they suggest women and people with radically new ideas may benefit from presenting their ideas to people or organizations who value creativity.

“Surprisingly, limited research has been conducted in the field of management on the receiving side of creativity, especially compared to other business fields and social sciences, such as education, entrepreneurship, marketing, psychology and sociology,” the authors wrote.

The authors limited their research to papers published between 1970 and 2018. They obtained an initial set of 8,346 papers from more than 400 journals representing several business and social science fields and interdisciplinary subfields. Only a fraction of the initial set of papers were deemed pertinent, and the process led the authors to focus on 107 papers to review and discuss.

“In this paper, we … show that there is a tremendous opportunity for management scholars to study this topic,” the authors wrote. “To the best of our knowledge, no published paper has systematically reviewed research into the perception and evaluation of creativity. We hope this review will inform and inspire management inquiry in this important field of study.”

Zhou co-authored the paper with Xiaoye May Wang of Tsinghua University; Davide Bavato and Stefano Tasselli of Erasmus University; and Junfeng Wu of the University of Texas at Dallas.

For a copy of the study, “Understanding the Receiving Side of Creativity: A Multidisciplinary Review and Implications for Management Research,” email jfalk@rice.edu.

For more information about and insights from Rice Business faculty research, visit the school’s Rice Business Wisdom website, https://business.rice.edu/wisdom.

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Related materials:

Zhou bio: http://business.rice.edu/person/jing-zhou