Creativity and Motivation: Part 2

What’s better for producing creative ideas or solutions within teams: competition or collaboration? The answer may surprise you.

A study published in the Academy of Management examined the effects of competition within teams, collaboration within teams, motivation and creativity. [1] In my previous post, I translated a set of findings from this study related to encouraging creativity through understanding individual employee motivations. In this post, I examine the team-related findings from this study.

Although the results of these types of studies can never be causally linked, this particular study found that collaboration within a team correlated with more creativity, but competition within teams had no effect on creativity.

It is important to note that this study was conducted in Taiwan, a culture that values collectivism (collectivism is the idea of promoting the group over the individual). As the authors of the study note, the cultural value may influence the findings of this study – particularly that collaboration yields more creative outcomes for teams. Additionally, competition as an external motivator may lead individuals with low internal motivation to produce more creative results.

What’s the practical impact on the workplace? It seems that, if you are part of a team that needs to generate more creative results in your work, creating opportunities to collaborate on ideas will be more effective than creating a competitive team environment.

Have you worked in competitive or collaborative team environments to produce creative results? Do you agree with the findings of this study? Share your thoughts here.

Read Part 1 here! 

[1] Zhu, Y., Gardner, D. G., & Chen, H. (2018). Relationships between work team climate, individual motivation, and creativity. Journal of Management, 44(5), 2094-2115. doi:10.1177/0149206316638161