The effect of manipulating group task orientation and support for innovation on collaborative creativity in an educational setting

Team climate is thought to play a vital role in shaping the process and outcomes of collaborative problem-solving. However, prior evidence for this proposition in the research literature is largely observational and correlational in nature. This report describes a field experiment that manipulates two key dimensions of group climate (West, 1990): group task orientation and support for innovation, and assesses the effects of this manipulation on the creativity of group solutions to a set of open-ended problems. Participants were 295 high school students in China working in 60 collaborative groups to solve four tasks used in prior creativity research. In order to establish a causal role for team climate in promoting creativity, rewards were used to manipulate the team climate factors of task orientation and support for innovation between groups in a 2 x 2 design. Task orientation, defined as a shared concern with excellence of group performance, was manipulated by informing some groups (but not others) in advance about both monetary and social performance rewards. Support for innovation, the expectation of and support for unique ideas, was manipulated by describing to some groups in advance an aspect of the scoring rule that rewarded originality (defined as unique answers to the tasks). The group responses to the tasks were scored on three dimensions often used to define creativity: fluency, flexibility, and originality. As hypothesized, the manipulations designed to incentivize a concern for excellence and support for innovation each showed a main effect in the form of higher creativity scores, but the effects were limited to the originality dimension. The findings suggest ways for educators and parents to plan and implement effective pedagogical strategies aimed at improving students' collaborative creativity.