Evaluation Shirking in Idea Management and Innovation

Christina Raasch

The proposed research program focuses on the evaluation of innovative ideas, that is, the quality assessments that decision-makers, or evaluators, make with regard to ideas for product or process innovations. Throughout this proposal, the term ‘idea evaluation’ describes an activity in which an evaluator assesses, likes, rates or recommends ideas shared by ideators. The proposed research program comprises three distinct projects. In project 1, I examine the relative importance of idea creation and idea evaluation for organizations’ innovation performance. Although the management literature has demonstrated the importance of both idea creation and idea evaluation for organizational performance, their relative importance remains an open question: To what extent, and for what reasons, is one more important than the other for innovation performance? Project 1 is thus fundamental for the entire research stream on idea evaluation and nicely sets the stage for projects 2 and 3 that zoom in on idea evaluation and shirking. In project 2, I ask how the number of co-evaluators affects incentives for evaluation shirking and investigate contingencies. In project 3, I examine whether and under what conditions employees’ incentives to shirk evaluation increases with their lateral distance to managers.