Igniting the Creative Spark in Organizations
Jack A. Goncalo, Barry M. Staw
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, May 2006
Firms that focus on individual employee achievement and uniqueness are more conducive to generating innovative ideas than companies that emphasize a team-based culture, according to University of California - Berkeley Haas School of Business Professor Barry Staw.
Surprisingly, even when groups who emphasize teamwork are instructed to be creative, they generate fewer ideas and less creative ideas than groups who are more focused on independent viewpoints, Staw concluded after conducting a study with 204 university students. Staw and co-author Jack Goncalo of Cornell University outlined their findings in an article titled "Individualism-Collectivism and Group Creativity," published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Staw and Goncalo's findings are the latest rally in a fierce academic debate over how culture relates to innovation. Other professors have argued that a strong and collectivistic culture – one that is more team-oriented and emphasizes organization-wide goals – may improve creativity when the firm has set widely accepted goals for innovation. They cite Hewlett-Packard and 3M as examples.
The advantages of an individualistic culture may be especially salient when innovation is an explicit goal, Staw and Goncalo hypothesize in their article. They define an individualistic culture as one that values uniqueness, encourages people to be independent from the group, and provides clear recognition for individual achievement.
To test this hypothesis, Staw and Goncalo conducted a one-hour experiment with teams of undergraduate students. First, participants completed a survey designed to prime a collectivistic or individualistic mindset. Then each group was instructed to be either creative or practical as they spent 15 minutes generating as many ideas as possible about how to solve a problem.
The problem was figuring out a new business for a space vacated by a mismanaged and low-quality restaurant at a major West Coast university. In the final phase, each group was asked to select the idea that they believed was either the most creative or practical.
Individualistic groups instructed to be more creative generated significantly more ideas (37.4 ideas on average) than collectivistic groups told to be creative (26.1 ideas on average). Collectivistic groups instructed to be creative generated significantly more restaurant ideas as a percentage of total ideas generated (14 percent) than individualistic groups (7 percent) given the same instructions to be creative.
And on a creativity scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most creative, ideas from individualistic groups instructed to be creative were more creative (with an average rating of 3.03) than those generated by collectivistic groups (with an average rating of 2.83).
