RESEARCH

Yanbo Song (Dissertation Chapter I)

How do creators engage early users in the co-creation process when their prototypes are unfinished? Integrating signaling theory and psychological ownership theory, this study introduces co-creation incompleteness, a communicative framing approach that balances participatory invitations with developmental distance. Analyzing a longitudinal dataset of 1,935 Early Access video games, I examine how creators frame unfinished prototypes to signal participatory potential under high information asymmetry, stimulate audience engagement, and build long-term community resilience. Results reveal that inclusive linguistic framing generates a co-creation premium, while epistemic hedging operates via a "vulnerability plateau," acting as an authenticity marker that yields diminishing returns once the perceived execution risk outweighs the participatory potential. Furthermore, prototype complexity (category spanning) triggers a "shape-flip," enforcing a moderate baseline (a "Goldilocks zone") for highly complex prototypes. Post-hoc longitudinal analyses imply that the psychological ownership generated during this nascent phase acts as a resilient affective buffer, protecting the product even after it transitions out of the institutional "forgiveness shield" of early release. This study advances the creativity and open innovation literatures by reframing idea pitching from an act of entrepreneurial persuasion into an ongoing participatory invitation.

Keywords: co-creation, idea pitching, signaling, feedback solicitation, open innovation, video games, platform community, cultural industry

Point Break? The Efficacy of Creative Differences as a Protective Label for Future Work

Spencer H. Harrison, Patrick Reilly, Yanbo Song, and Khwan Kim

https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amj.2023.0759

Creative projects require teams to both generate and integrate divergent ideas. While divergent ideas are necessary for creative success, they can also foster disagreements that can lead to collaborative breakdowns where individuals leave a project. Because creative work requires a strong reputation for moving from project to project, collaborative breakdowns threaten the ability to secure future work opportunities. We conduct a qualitative and a quantitative study to investigate the effectiveness of "creative differences" as a protective label for individuals that leave creative projects. Our inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews with Hollywood professionals reveals the potential for reputational damage following a collaborative breakdown, as well as the role of "creative differences" as a professionally ambiguous attribution meant to mitigate this damage. However, our informants offer conflicting views on its efficacy. From these insights, we abductively test hypotheses in a quantitative study examining directors who depart films due to creative differences, comparing them with those who leave for other reasons. Our study contributes by uncovering a novel dilemma in creative work—the role of collaborative breakdowns—and the potential hazards of relying on professionally ambiguous attributions as reputational shields for future career opportunities.

Keywords: creativity, collaboration, conflict, leadership, career, mixed-approach

Job Crafting in Competitive Contexts: The Influence of Inter-team Competition and Leadership Orientation

Yanbo Song and Winnie Y. Jiang

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-026-10117-z

This study examines how inter-team competition and team leadership orientation jointly influence team members' job crafting within a multi-team organization. Drawing on social comparison theory and self-regulation theory, we hypothesized an inverted U-shaped relationship between inter-team competition and job crafting, whereby team members' job crafting peaks under moderate levels of inter-team competition but declines when competition becomes excessive. Additionally, we proposed that this curvilinear relationship is moderated by team leaders' orientation. We tested our hypotheses in a restaurant chain in China during the pandemic. Following exploratory interviews with 20 store managers to develop a contextually grounded job crafting measure, we collected survey data from 722 frontline employees nested within 133 store-based teams. Robust linear mixed-effects modeling supported the inverted U-shaped relationships between inter-team competition and employees' task, relational, and cognitive crafting, with the strongest evidence for cognitive crafting. Furthermore, task-oriented leadership attenuated the curvilinear effect of competition on task crafting. These findings contribute to the job crafting literature by illustrating how structural competitive pressures and proximal leadership behaviors dynamically shape employee proactivity, offering practical insights for calibrating competitive structures and leadership approaches to create conditions that optimize employees' job crafting.

Keywords: job crafting, proactivity, inter-team competition, leadership orientation, self-regulation social comparison, team dynamics

Divergence and distribution of positive effect among co-founders and early venture assessments [Title redacted for peer review]

In collaboration with Milovac, M. and Sanchez-Burks, J.

When co-founders pitch a new venture, how they express emotion can shape how their startup is judged. Across two studies, we examine how divergence and distribution of positive affect between co-founders influence investor evaluations. In Study 1, we analyze pitch videos submitted to top accelerators and find that emotional divergence—when co-founders show different levels of enthusiasm—boosts early-stage funding and growth, especially when they hold distinct functional roles. In Study 2, an experiment reveals that investors respond most favorably when co-founders in creative roles express more positive affect. Together, the findings show how emotional dynamics signal complementarity and shape perceptions of venture potential.

Keywords: co-founding, affect, perception, early-stage entrepreneurship, mixed-approach