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Abstract

Research has shown that individuals' level of identification with an organization tends to result in positive outcomes such as higher motivation and effort. However, the influence of organizational identification on another vital element of organizational life, creativity, has hitherto largely been ignored. We study identification and creativity in the context of open innovation. More specifically, we explore whether external participants in ideation generation contexts who strongly identify with the client organization produce ideas of better or worse quality for this organization. As hypothesized, grounded in the social identity approach, HLM results provide evidence that individuals who identify more with the client organizations produce ideas of lower quality. At the same time, exerting persistent effort towards improving specific ideas leads to higher quality ideas. Implications for theory and managerial practice are derived.

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