Incentives and creativity in groups

Joachim Ramm, Sigve Tjøtta () and Gaute Torsvik
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Joachim Ramm: Minestry of Local Governmenet and Regional Development

No 06/13, Working Papers in Economics from University of Bergen, Department of Economics

Abstract: It has been argued that monetary incentives restrain individual creativity and hamper performance in jobs requiring out of the box thinking. This paper reports from an experiment designed to test if the negative incentive effect is present also when individuals work together to solve such problems. We do not find a negative impact of incentives on group performance. As a comparison we ran the same experiment (the Candle Problem) with and without incentives for individuals as well. Incentives did not reduce performance there either. Comparing individuals with groups we find that team-work facilitates creative problems solving. Individuals appear to be more creative when working together than when working alone.

Keywords: Incentives; innovation; creativity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 M11 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2013-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-ino
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Incentives and Creativity in Groups (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:bergec:2013_006

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