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27 - Clawing Back a Promising Paper
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- By Teresa M. Amabile, Harvard Business School, Regina Conti, Colgate University, Heather Coon, North Central College
- Edited by Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, New York, Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- Ethical Challenges in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- Published online:
- 05 February 2015
- Print publication:
- 26 January 2015, pp 83-84
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- Chapter
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Summary
TMA: Over twenty years ago, when Regina was my graduate student in psychology at Brandeis University and Heather was my lab manager, Regina and I collaborated on a creativity experiment. Regina had taken the lead on the project and was first author on the paper, which we had submitted to a journal. We were delighted when the editor wrote back after skimming the paper, saying that he found it very interesting and was sending it out for review immediately. We crossed our fingers and hoped for the best as we plunged back into our other in-progress research. This was Regina’s second submission to a scholarly journal, and we were both hopeful that it would help build her curriculum vitae in the years before her job market entry. Regina excitedly shared the results at our weekly brown bag series, where Heather expressed an interest in the paper.
HC: After reading Regina and Teresa’s paper, I suspected that the central analysis that they used, a True Score ANCOVA, could be useful for a study I had conducted, and so I asked Regina to show me how to do it. She agreed, and we sat down at a lab computer to look together at the syntax file for the analysis. During Regina’s explanation, I spotted misplaced parentheses in the coding of the covariate. After she acknowledged the mistake, I said that I realized this could affect the paper she had under review. I felt very badly about it because I knew that Regina had invested a great deal of time in the study, and I also knew that rerunning the analysis might change the results. We talked about what to do. I did not want to pressure Regina into rechecking the analysis, but I think we both knew that this was what should happen.
7 - Environmental determinants of work motivation, creativity, and innovation: The case of R&D downsizing
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- By Teresa M. Amabile, Harvard University, Boston, MA, Regina Conti, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
- Edited by Raghu Garud, New York University, Praveen Rattan Nayyar, New York University, Zur Baruch Shapira, New York University
- Foreword by James G. March
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- Book:
- Technological Innovation
- Published online:
- 07 October 2011
- Print publication:
- 28 April 1997, pp 111-126
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Summary
Innovation, even technological innovation, has a distinctly human face. It is a serious technological oversight to ignore the human side of innovation – the motivation driving those who create new technologies. In particular, it is important to consider the impact of the work environment surrounding these individuals, an environment that emerges from management attitudes toward technological progress and risk-taking. Such attitudes are likely to be significantly affected by major organizational change. In this chapter we consider the effects of the work environment on innovation and, in particular, the effects of organizational downsizing on the work environment for innovation. What happens to entrepreneurial, risk-taking activity among scientists and technicians during periods of turbulence? If there is an impact on such behaviors, it is likely that technological innovation itself will be affected as well.
In chapter 3 in this volume, Garud, Nayyar, and Shapira treat technological oversights and foresights as consequences of choices by firms to invest or withhold investment in a particular technology. The focus is on risk-taking behavior by key managers in the firm. At a more microscopic level, however, the creation and development of new ideas for technological innovations depends on appropriate risk-oriented thinking among the inventors themselves. Garud, Nayyar, and Shapira briefly suggest that such behavior depends, at least in part, on the organizational environment that top management has established in the firm. This is the central thesis that we present here.