How creative
are you? Depends where you're from
With the 'creative class' on the
rise, many businesses are trying to capitalize on imagination and innovation.
But when it comes to creative juices, some societies have a faster flow than
others. That's because, as new research suggests, creativity is tied to
culture.
The study, recently published in The
Journal of Business Research, compared nearly 300 individuals from Taiwan,
a collectivist society, and Canada, a more individualistic country. Results
show that those from individualist societies generate a greater number of ideas
as compared to their collectivist counterparts -- though the cultures were on
nearly equal footing when it came to the quality of that creative output.
Gad
Saad, a professor at Concordia's John Molson School of Business, co-authored
the study with Concordia graduate student Louis Ho and Mark Cleveland from the
University of Western Ontario. They theorized that where a country falls on the
individualism vs. collectivism continuum would affect the creative juices that
might be "permitted" to flow from members of a particular culture.
"Brainstorming
is often used as a proxy for creativity, so we decided to conduct brainstorming
tasks using culturally neutral stimuli in Taiwan and in Canada," Saad
says.
He
and his co-authors hypothesized that members of an individualistic society
would perform particularly well in a task that promotes out-of-the-box thinking
such as coming up with the proverbial million-dollar idea, compared with those
from a collectivist ethos, who wouldn't be as willing to engage in that kind of
thinking because they would be more reluctant to stand out from the group.
The
researchers recruited students from two universities in Taipei and Montreal and
collected data on five measures that will be familiar to anyone who has had to
brainstorm in a group:
1.
The
number of generated ideas
2.
The
quality of the ideas, as evaluated by independent judges
3.
The
number of uttered negative statements within the brainstorming groups, such as
"This is a
dumb idea that will fail."
dumb idea that will fail."
4.
The
valence of the negative statements -- "This is the all-time dumbest
idea" has a stronger
negative connotation than "This idea is rather banal."
negative connotation than "This idea is rather banal."
5.
The
confidence level exhibited by group members when asked to evaluate their
performance in
comparison to other teams.
comparison to other teams.
When it comes to creativity, quality
trumps quantity
"The study largely supported our hypotheses," Saad says. "We found that the individualists came up with many more ideas. They also uttered more negative statements -- and those statements were more strongly negative. The Canadian group also displayed greater overconfidence than their Taiwanese counterparts."
But
when it came to the quality of ideas produced, the collectivists scored
marginally higher than the individualists.
"This
is in line with another important cultural trait that some collectivist
societies are known to possess -- namely being more reflective as compared to
action-oriented, having the reflex to think hard prior to committing to a
course of action," Saad says.
Studies
like this one are instrumental in understanding cultural differences that
increasingly arise as the globe's economic centre of gravity shifts towards
East Asia.
"To
maximize the productivity of their international teams, global firms need to
understand important cultural differences between Western and Eastern
mindsets," Saad says. "Brainstorming, a technique often used to
generate novel ideas such as new product innovations, might not be equally
effective across cultural settings. Even though individuals from collectivistic
societies might be coming up with fewer creative ideas, the quality of
those ideas tends to be just as good as or marginally better than those of
their individualistic counterparts. Employers need to recognize that."
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Concordia University. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1. Gad Saad, Mark
Cleveland, Louis Ho. Individualism–collectivism and the quantity versus
quality dimensions of individual and group creative performance. Journal
of Business Research, 2015; 68 (3): 578 DOI:10.1016/j.jbusres.2014.09.004
