Heedful proactivity: How individual tactical considerations contribute to pre-screening of innovative ideas in the hierarchy

Abstract

Purposefully fostering creativity and innovation through stimulating proactivity requires grappling with an apparent trade-off. On the one hand, organization members need some autonomy to initiate change. On the other hand, managers might want to steer initiatives and retain control over outcomes. The current paper advances recent work on how proactivity is enacted as a compromise between autonomy and control by studying the process through which bottom-up ideas are shared in highly hierarchical organizations. Based on an abductive analysis of data from informants in 42 organizations, we develop the concept of pre-screening, which denotes collective action patterns geared towards qualifying individuals' innovative ideas before they are made subject to formal decision making. We explain how proactive individuals' tactical considerations—informed by their holistic prospective thinking, risk hedging, temporal splitting, and a both/and approach to proactivity and hierarchy—influence the actions through which ideas are shared and who are approached first (e.g., supervisors vs. peers). We also exemplify how action patterns accomplishing idea sharing and pre-screening are entangled with more mundane workplace routines. Overall, the paper sheds new light on ideas' journeys in the context of hierarchy and opens up multiple avenues for future research.