The Effects of Evaluator Type and Incentive Structure on Creativity

2020-02-10

2020-03-20

The number of ideas generated by participants. The average and variance of the novelty and usefulness of each idea. The overall creativity of each idea. Overall participation rates.

Examining the number of ideas generated will provide us with an initial proxy of the level of creative effort exerted by participants. The scholarship on creativity defines an idea as creative if it is both novel and useful. The novelty and usefulness of an idea is subjective by nature. Corporate executives and other teachers and staff may have different assessments of the novelty and usefulness of a given idea. The novelty and usefulness (i.e., the creativity) of each idea will be judged by corporate executives and other staff members/teachers. Finally, while every teacher and staff member will be encouraged to share their ideas, some may choose not to. The decision to or not to participate may be driven by the exogenously varied parameters of the experiment, so participation rates will be a useful dependent variable in our analysis.

Survey responses that capture employees’ self-reported levels of connectedness, creativity, and risk aversion.

Self-reported measures of connectedness, creativity, and risk aversion are hypothesized to be forward looking measures of productivity, retention, and willingness to participate in contests.

Teachers and staff members will be asked to complete a single survey that will enter each of them into two separate contests. The first contest will prompt participants to share their best idea that will “help [the firm] increase the number of students enrolled into music classes,” and the second contest will prompt participants to share their best idea that will “help [the firm] do something better.” The ideas will be evaluated based on their creativity, which has two parts, novelty and usefulness. The parameters of the contests will vary in two ways: (1) who the evaluators of the ideas are and (2) the incentive structure for sharing ideas.

Participants will be told that they will be competing against approximately 50 others. They will be told that their ideas will be evaluated either by a panel of top-level executives or by a panel of fellow teachers/staff members (their peers). In each of the two contests, the participant with the most creative idea will be recognized nationally. In some treatment arms, the participant with the most creative idea will receive a $250 prize. In other treatment arms, the ten participants with the ten most creative ideas will receive $25 prizes.

After being told the parameters (who their evaluators will be and whether they are competing for one $250 prize or ten $25 prizes), participants will be prompted to answer the two contest questions. They will then be asked to answer several questions about their tenure with the firm, work experience in education, habits for idea generation, connectedness, creativity, risk aversion, and demographics. All participants who complete the survey once will receive a $5 participation fee. Participants will be allowed to take the survey multiple times, but they will only receive the $5 participation fee for the first submission. Ideas from each additional survey submission will be entered into the contests for national recognition and prize money.

All submitted ideas will be de-identified when individuals from the two different groups read and evaluate the creativity of the ideas. Corporate executives and other (non-competing) teachers/staff members will use a 100-point scale to judge the novelty, usefulness, and creativity of each idea. The ideas with the best average creativity score will determine the winners of each contest, and prizes (Visa gift cards) will be awarded to the winners (participation fee Visa gift cards will be sent out to all participants at this time, too). The randomization procedure to place participants into treatment arms is as follows:

• There are three treatment arms: (1) Executive Evaluation with one $250 prize; (2) Executive Evaluation with ten $25 prizes; (3) Peer Evaluation with one $250 prize.
• There are 92 offices clustered in 27 different states/provinces (called regions) in North America.
• We will randomly allocate the 27 regions into one of the three treatment arms, making sure there is reasonable balance in the number of offices and eligible participants in each treatment arm.
• We will allocate individuals into treatment arms at the region-level to attenuate the possibility that workers in different treatment arms communicate with one another about the different parameters of their respective contest.

Teachers and staff members will not be required to complete the survey. Participation is voluntary, so the final number of participants/ideas in each treatment arm will vary. Participation rates, however, are a useful dependent variable for creative idea generation, as all teachers and staff members at participating locations will be invited to participate in the survey and told the parameters of the competition that pertain to their office.

Randomization done in office by a computer

State/Province (which we call "Region")

Yes

27 Regions

120-360 Ideas

Regions will be randomized into one of the three treatment arms such that each treatment arm has approximately the same number of regions, offices, and eligible participants. There are 92 offices total, spread across 27 regions. We anticipate that 172 workers will be eligible to participate. Some offices have over 30 people, whereas others contain only a single individual. We estimate that each treatment arm will contain approximately 50-60 eligible workers.