Creativity Depends On Where You Come From

With the rise of the “creative class”, many companies are trying to capitalize on imagination and innovation. But when it comes to creativity, some societies develop faster than others because creativity is related to culture. At least that’s what new research from the University of Concordia in Montreal (Canada) suggests.

The latest study, published in the Journal of Business Research   , compared nearly 300 Taiwanese, members of a collectivist society, to Canadians, a more individualistic country. The results show that people belonging to individualistic societies develop more ideas than their collectivist counterparts. The comparisons with regard to the evaluation of creativity were made under the same conditions.

The researchers speculate that a country that promotes individualism creates an environment in which creative thoughts are more likely to be allowed, rather than desired. “Brainstorming is often seen as a tool to call up creativity, so we asked the study participants to brainstorm it. For this task, neutral stimuli were chosen as topics for the respective society, ” explains Gad Saad. Saad is a professor at the John Molson School of Business at the University of Concordia. He is also a co-author of the aforementioned study.

Think outside the box

Saad and colleagues believe that members of an individualistic society are particularly better at doing tasks that require thinking outside the box. On the other hand, members of a collectivist group would be less willing to develop such thoughts. They would be more reluctant to stand out from the group.

The researchers recruited students from two universities, notably Taipei, Taiwan and Montreal, Canada. They collected the following data:

• The number of ideas generated.
• The quality of the ideas, assessed by independent judges.
• The number of negative statements like “This is a stupid idea”   or “I think it would be a mistake” .
• In this negative statements also rated high : “This is a stupid idea”   is less negative than “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”
• The confidence of the participants in their own group, which became evident when they are asked to assess their performance relative to other teams.

“The study results are largely in line with our hypotheses,” says Saad. The researcher explained that the individualists generated more ideas and made more negative statements. The Canadian group was also more confident than their Taiwanese counterparts.

“When it comes to the quality of the ideas produced, the ideas of the collectivists were better than those of the individualists.”

Saad explains that these results reveal another important cultural characteristic of collectivist societies: reflection is valued. Individualists are action-oriented and don’t think long before they act.

Studies like this are fundamental to understanding cultural differences. This is becoming more and more important as the world is growing closer and closer together, even if individual people try to prevent this with all their might. “To maximize the productivity of international teams, global companies need to address cultural differences between Western and Eastern mindsets,”   says Saad.