Abstract
When organizations crowdsource ideas, they select only a small share of the ideas that contributors submit for implementation. If a contributor submits an idea to an organization for the first time (i.e., is a newcomer), and the organization does not select the idea, this may negatively affect the newcomer’s relationship with the organization and willingness to submit ideas to the organization in future. We suggest that organizations can increase newcomers’ willingness to submit further ideas by providing a thus far understudied form of feedback: rejections. Though counterintuitive, we suggest that rejections encourage newcomers to bond with an organization. Rejections signal contributors that an organization is interested in receiving their ideas and developing relationships with them. To test our theory, we examine the crowdsourcing of 70,159 organizations that received ideas from 1,336,154 contributors. Using text analysis, we examine differences in how rejections are written to disentangle the mechanisms through which rejections affect contributors’ willingness to continue to interact with an organization. We find that receiving a rejection positively impacts newcomers’ willingness to submit ideas in future. This effect is stronger if the rejection includes an explanation and is particularly pronounced if the explanation matches the original idea in terms of linguistic style.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 503-530 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | Academy of Management Journal |
| Volume | 62 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 1 Jan 2019 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Apr 2019 |
Funding
Both authors contributed equally. We thank David Kelley, founder and former CEO of IDEO, who encouraged us to study rejections to understand how organizations handle ideas that they do not select for implementation. We appreciate constructive comments from Ron Adner, Gautam Ahuja, Oliver Alexy, Philip Anderson, Steve Barley, Christopher Bingham, Ron Burt, David Clough, Dirk Deichmann, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, Henrich Greve, Riitta Katila, Dan Levinthal, Atul Nerkar, John Padgett, Phanish Puranam, Subramanian Rangan, Philipp Reineke, and Violina Rindova, as well as from seminar participants at Bocconi University, Chicago Booth School of Business, Erasmus University, ESMT, Harvard Business School, Imperial College London, INSEAD, Linköping University, the National University of Singapore, New York University, Stanford University, St. Gallen University, Tilburg University, the University of Hamburg, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Vienna. We have received generous financial support from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the Sloan Research Project on the Economics of Knowledge Contribution, and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford University. All errors are our own.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Business and International Management
- General Business,Management and Accounting
- Strategy and Management
- Management of Technology and Innovation