A study examined how senior leaders respond when employees bring forward ideas that vary in radicalness, focusing on the leader’s own appraisal rather than employee tactics. Leaders low in creative personality tended to appraise radical ideas as threatening, which reduced the likelihood that those ideas were endorsed. Leaders high in creative personality appraised the same ideas as a challenge, with reduced threat appraisal, and were more likely to endorse them. The pattern held across a three-wave field study of 167 leader-employee dyads and was replicated in a scenario-based experiment with 300 leader participants.
The findings were published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior on 26 September 2026, under the title “When and Why Do Leaders Endorse Radical Ideas? A Transactional Theory of Stress Perspective.”
Source: Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2026-09-26.