Benevolent rejections: How organizations foster engagement in the search for innovation
Henning Piezunka · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2015
Organizations strive to innovate. One avenue for organizations to innovate is to solicit suggestions from external contributors. So far research focuses on the potential of soliciting suggestions from external contributors, but neglects the danger of frustrating contributors as most of their suggestions are not selected for implementation. We ask how organizations can handle contributors whose suggestions are not selected. We develop the concept of benevolent rejection as a potential method. While most organizations simply do not respond to suggestions they do not select, we propose that organizations should explicitly reject them. While rejections are generally associated with ending relationships, we hypothesize that they foster the relationship between organizations and their contributors. Specifically, we hypothesize that rejections increase contributors’ tendency to make suggestions and the chances of such future suggestions being selected. We test our theory using a unique dataset capturing how 70,196 organizations handle 1,355,010 suggestions. Our analysis confirms the hypothesized relationships. In additional analysis we examine how the explanation coming with a rejection matters as well as how the effect of rejections differs across contributors. In addition to the effect on engagement and effectiveness, we also find that rejections render contributors more critical of other contributors’ suggestions. Our research illustrates how rejections play an important role in fostering the organizations’ innovation and managing the relationship with external contributors.