Creativity in New Product Development; When Collectivistic Values Outperform Individualistic Values

Research shows that individualism is preferable to collectivism when we desire creativity as an outcome. However, empirical evidence shows that countries or organizations from Eastern cultures (e.g., Japan, Korea, etc.) often outperform those from Western cultures when it comes to new patents and other proxies of creative activity. Across two studies, we highlight a situation under which a collectivistic mind-set outperforms an individualistic mind-set in terms of creative output. Specifically, in a high construal scenario, ideas generated by participants primed with an interdependent mind-set were judged to be more creative relative to ideas by participants primed with an independent mind-set – on both dimensions of creativity: originality and usefulness. However, no differences in creativity were found between interdependent and independent participants in low construal. Our nascent findings have the potential to advance knowledge of creativity and its processes, in general, and its effects on cross cultural performance, in specific.

Citation:

Jungim Mun and Charles D. Lindsey (2013) ,"Creativity in New Product Development; When Collectivistic Values Outperform Individualistic Values ", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 41, eds. Simona Botti and Aparna Labroo, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research.