Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

The Effect of Job Experience in “R”, “D” or Both on Creative Idea Evaluation

• In Event: Performance Measurement

Abstract

I investigate how the evaluator’s prior job experience influences her evaluation of creative
ideas. Workers in the creative industry could either start their job related to generating
ideas (R from R&D) or implementing ideas (D from R&D), and their job responsibility
will become evaluating ideas when they are promoted to the managers’ position. I
propose that idea evaluators with different prior job experience show biased evaluation
by which they overemphasize one aspect of creativity aspect against another.
Specifically, evaluators who have prior job experience in generating ideas are likely to
overemphasize the novelty aspect of an idea and thus over-estimate its creativity,
whereas evaluators who have prior job experience in implementing ideas are likely to
overemphasize the feasibility aspect of an idea and thus under-estimate its creativity.
Further, I predict that such evaluation bias could be mitigated by job rotation, a control
mechanism that mix job experience between idea generation and implementation. The
experimental results are in line with my predictions. This study extends the literature
on the relationship between management control and creativity performance by
focusing on creative idea evaluation, and contributes to the understanding of the
subjective evaluation bias in the creativity context.

Author

• Shanming Liu, ESSEC Business School