Creative Star or Territorial Jerk? The Interpersonal Consequences of Claiming Ownership over Creative Ideas at Work

Abstract

Employee creativity—the generation of novel and useful ideas—is vital for organizational growth and survival. To encourage creativity, organizations often reward employees who develop successful ideas, motivating them to claim ownership over their specific creative ideas. However, this dissertation argues that such idea ownership-claiming behaviors are a double-edged sword. Drawing from the Dual Perspective Model of social evaluation, this study proposes that claiming ownership of creative ideas leads to positive evaluations by coworkers of the focal employee’s creative potential but can also result in coworkers perceiving such individuals as territorial, influencing their willingness to collaborate on subsequent creative work. The study further proposes that the idea claiming employee’s granting of idea ownership to other coworkers’ ideas serves as a moderating factor, amplifying the positive effect of perceived creative potential and mitigating the negative effect of perceived territoriality on coworkers’ willingness to collaborate creatively with them. Finding support from a field study and three pre-registered lab experiments, the current research sheds light on the importance of balancing idea ownership claims with acknowledging others’ contributions to navigate the collaboration dynamics in organizations.