Managerial Decision Making in Open Innovation: The Effect of Individual Hierarchy Level on the Evaluation of Customers’ and Employee’s ideas

The present research deals with the influence of managers’ construal level on evaluations of customers and employee’s ideas in innovation contexts. While prior research found one’s situational construal level associated with creativity and feasibility ratings of ideas, we provide theory and evidence to suggest that the true hierarchy level of managers can alter evaluations of ideas from different sources. We conducted an experiment with 113 German-speaking managers to reveal that top-managers, processing information on higher construal levels, tend to distinct creativity ratings of an idea, depending on its source (customer’s vs. employee’s ideas). Lower-level managers showed no difference in their creativity evaluations, but differentiated their feasibility rating in respect to the source of ideas (customer vs. employee) whereas top-managers did not. In addition, post hoc analysis showed that especially the evaluation of customers’ ideas benefit from this rating biases of top and lower level management. Our findings contribute to existing managerial decision making and construal level research. Furthermore, relevant practical implications, especially for marketing and innovation management, can be deduced.