The Effects of Rewards on Team Creativity

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matthias Weiß
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2020 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439290255

In today's business world, innovation is widely seen as a major facilitator of competitive advantage and business success. A necessary requirement for the creation of innovations is the creativity of employees who are carrying out innovative activities in organizations. Therefore, a vast body of research has accumulated on antecedents of creativity in organizations and on approaches to foster creativity. A prominent role among these approaches, both in research as well as in organizational application, has played the use of rewards to foster creativity. In this regard, rewards are seen as extrinsic forms of reinforcement such as money, prizes, or recognition. However, while the effects of rewards on creativity have been systematically examined on the individual level, there is a void of systematic research on the effects of rewards on team creativity. This is problematic, though, as the vast majority of creative tasks in companies are executed by teams, and given that the complex interaction processes in teams prohibit a direct transfer of theories and empirical results from the individual level to the team level. Because of that, there exist barely any evidence based insights whether and how rewards can be effectively used to facilitate team creativity and it is unclear whether currently applied reward systems in organizations actually serve their purpose. To fill this void of research on a theoretically and practically highly relevant antecedent of team creativity, this study focuses on the following three core research questions:1) Do rewards facilitate or impede team creativity?2) Which mediators transmit the potentially facilitating or impeding effects of rewards on team creativity?3) Which contingency factors enhance or decrease the potentially facilitating or impeding effects of rewards on team creativity?To address these research questions, the proposed research project will embrace two empirical approaches. First, the effects of rewards on team creativity will be examined in an experimental study based on two laboratory experiments. Second, a survey-based field study of innovation teams will examine the relationships between rewards and team creativity in real organizational settings. The combination of experimental and field based empirics will allow for triangulation of results and ensure a high level of internal as well as external validity of findings. Hence, the proposed study promises a substantial contribution to theory development on determinants of team creativity and the development of evidence based and practically relevant recommendations regarding the effective design of reward systems for creative team tasks in organizations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants