When and How Newcomers Benefit Team Creativity: A Motivated Information Processing Approach

Abstract

In this paper, we examined when and how team membership change benefited team creativity in terms of the usefulness and novelty of team outcomes. Drawing on the Motivated Information Processing in Groups model (MIP-G, De Dreu, Nijstad, & Knippenberg, 2008), we predicted that team membership change exerted more positively influence on team creativity when teams were pro-socially motivated via collective rewards compared to teams without collective rewards. We also predicted that when rewarded collectively, team membership change contributed to team creativity because members were epistemically motivated to engage in team reflexivity. Two laboratory studies were conducted using the poster design task. Results indicated that the presence of newcomers contributed to higher creative outcomes only when teams were collective rewarded. Moreover, we also found indirect evidence that team membership change led to team reflexivity, and the increased reflexivity may be responsible for the positive effects of member change on team creativity in condition of collective rewards.