Abstract
Membership change has been found to stimulate collective idea generation but to not always benefit group creativity—the generation of final outcomes that are novel and useful. Based on motivated information processing theory, we propose that membership change challenges group members to generate more ideas, but that this only contributes to group creativity when members have high levels of prosocial motivation and are willing to process and integrate each other’s ideas. In a laboratory study of 56 student groups, we found that incremental, but not radical, idea generation mediated the positive effect of membership change on group creativity, and only when group members were prosocially motivated. The present study points to different roles of incremental versus radical ideas and underscores the importance of accounting for prosocial motivation in groups for reaping the benefits of membership change in relation to group creativity.
Highlights
Membership change has been found to stimulate collective idea generation but to not always benefit group creativity—the generation of final outcomes that are novel and useful
We draw on motivated information processing in groups (MIP-G) theory (De Dreu et al, 2008, 2011; Nijstad & De Dreu, 2012) to examine two questions: (a) under which conditions does membership change contribute to group creative outputs, and (b) what is the role of idea generation in this process? MIP-G theory suggests that group creativity requires epistemic motivation to drive members to engage in in-depth information processing, and prosocial motivation to stimulate members to work interdependently and in the interest of the group (Bechtoldt et al, 2010)
We found that membership change was more likely to increase the novelty of team products under high prosocial motivation, and that this positive effect was translated via the generation of incremental ideas
Summary
Membership change has been found to stimulate collective idea generation but to not always benefit group creativity—the generation of final outcomes that are novel and useful. Based on MIP-G theory, we predict that membership change will stimulate idea generation, but that this only translates into high levels of group creativity when group members have high prosocial motivation This perspective suggests that the effect of membership change on group creativity essentially boils down to the question of how creative ideas are used and integrated into a final group product. In this respect, it is important to note that not all ideas are created equal, but that they vary from minor adaptations (incremental ideas) to radical breakthroughs (radical ideas), depending on their relative originality as compared to existing ideas (Janssen, 2003; Silva & Oldham, 2012).
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