Does criticism motivate creativity? A research on the effects of negative feedbacks on team creativity

Abstract

Abstract: In the Web 2.0 era, the boundary of innovative team becomes increasingly open, which has made team's creative work vulnerable to external negative feedbacks. However, the external antecedents of team creativity have been largely neglected in the literature. Thus, this study tested the impacts of different styles of external negative feedbacks on team creativity, as well as the moderating effects of team characteristic (cooperative goal interdependence) on those impacts from a motivated information processing perspective, and proposed the related hypotheses. Using hierarchical regression to analyze the data collected in a laboratory experiment of 97 teams, we found the following results which could enrich our understanding about the external antecedents of team creativity: firstly, controlling negative feedback has a negative impact on the novelty dimension of team creativity, and cooperative goal interdependence weakens this impact through a negative moderating effect on it; secondly, informational negative feedback has positive impacts on both the novelty dimension and the meaningfulness dimension of team creativity, and cooperative goal interdependence strengthens those impacts through positive moderating effects on them.

Key words: negative feedback, team creativity, goal interdependence, motivated information processing, experimental study

CLC Number:

C931.2

Geng Zizhen, Liu Xinmei, Zhang Xiaofei. Does criticism motivate creativity? A research on the effects of negative feedbacks on team creativity[J]. Science Research Management, 2015, 36(8): 36-43.

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