Guiding the study of how leaders can overcome a bias against novelty in organizations

Research shows that the leadership role is a context that changes the nature of how people evaluate ideas. Leaders who are responsible for determining which of their subordinates’ ideas will remain in the organization often reject their subordinates’ novel ideas even when novelty is desired and the ideas themselves are high quality. Given that leaders are often the primary decision-makers who determine if their subordinates’ ideas make an impact, these findings suggest that leaders may present a major organizational barrier to their subordinates’ novel ideas. The creativity literature has made important advances to the study of idea evaluation, with relatively less of a focus on how leaders can overcome a bias against subordinates’ novel ideas. To help future research fill this gap and identify how leaders can overcome a bias against novelty, this chapter reviews emerging research on the bias against novelty and applies this work to the context of leaders evaluating subordinates’ ideas, thereby identifying new questions the prior literature has not yet addressed. This chapter then identifies two broad and nonoverlapping approaches scholars can adopt to aid future research when studying this bias—the outcome- and processed-based approaches—arguing that the process-based approach may better fit the challenges of studying leaders in the field. The chapter then identifies several open questions to help guide future research directions.