Abstract
How does framing strategy around competition versus collaboration affect employee idea generation? We conduct a field experiment with 317 employees across 15 ventures in Latin America to assess the causal impact of strategic framing on employee contributions. Employees were randomly assigned to view either a competitively or collaboratively framed version of their firm's strategy statement. Those in the competitive framing condition generate approximately 14% fewer ideas and report lower psychological safety. However, competitive framing simultaneously increases the executive-rated novelty of submitted ideas by approximately 12%. The novelty effect is concentrated among firms without existing competitive orientation, suggesting that novel frames challenge existing mental models and redirect attention toward differentiation. While prior research has documented how strategic framing affects external stakeholders, such as investors and job candidates, we show that the same framing may induce novelty but at the expense of quantity of ideas among current employees. Firms based in emerging markets may be especially prone to such a novelty discount, as collaboration becomes necessary to navigate uncertain and institutionally fragmented environments.