Incentives and Creativity in Groups — Experimental Evidence on Creative Processes and Dimensions

Erik Sarrazin ()
Additional contact information
Erik Sarrazin: Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany

No 2601, Working Papers from Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Abstract: Creativity and teamwork are central to modern work, yet little is known about how incentives shape creative group processes across different creativity dimensions, specifically quantity, quality, and originality. I run a pre-registered lab experiment with 640 participants in which three-person groups complete a novel verbal creative coordination task under flat pay or one of three relative-performance schemes targeting quantity, quality, or originality. Results show that incentivizing quantity leads to broader exploration, raises both the number and average originality of ideas (0.79 SD and 0.28 SD), and more than doubles the probability of producing a top-percentile innovative idea (+6.7 pp on a 4.6% base). Directly incentivizing originality has no significant effect on originality, while quality responds to incentives targeting any dimension. Mediation analysis attributes treatment effects to effort during idea generation, not to changes in group processes. Across all conditions, even when groups are paid exclusively for originality, groups systematically discard their most original ideas during idea evaluation and selection. These results provide the first experimental evidence on dimension-specific group incentives across the full creative process and show that motivational alignment alone cannot overcome the structural bias against originality in collaborative selection.

Keywords: creativity; innovation; incentives; teamwork; laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D02 M52 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2026-01-15, Revised 2026-05-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://download.uni-mainz.de/RePEc/pdf/Discussion_Paper_2601.pdf first version, 2026 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jgu:wpaper:2601

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Research Unit IPP ().