With the? Creative guy? As many companies grow, they try to use their imagination and innovation more frequently in their daily lives, but on this issue, does society condition creativity?
Creativity is linked to culture. At least, that’s what a new study by researchers from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada suggests.
Creativity is linked to culture. In individualistic societies, people produce more ideas.
The study, recently published in the Journal of Business Research, compared nearly 300 people from Taiwan, a collectivist society, and Canada, a more individualistic country.
The results showed that people in individualistic societies create more ideas than their collectivistic counterparts. These comparisons were made in terms of equality in assessing the quality of creative production.
The researchers hypothesized that when a country enters individualism, at the expense of continuous collectivism, does the situation interfere with creative games that could be?be a member of a particular culture.
“Brainstorming is often used as a substitute for creativity, so we decided to exchange ideas using culturally neutral stimuli in Taiwan and Canada,” said Gad Saad, professor at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business and co-author of the study.
Saad and his colleagues worked on the assumption that members of an individualistic society would do particularly well in an activity that encourages people to think outside the box, trying to come up with a million-dollar idea.
On the other hand, members of a collectivist group would not be willing to participate in this type of reflection, as they would be more reluctant to distance the group.
Researchers recruited students from two universities: Taipei (Taiwan) and Montreal, Canada, and collected the following data:
“The study greatly supports our assumptions,” Saad said. The researcher explained that they had discovered that individualists produced many more ideas and made more negative statements. The Canadian group also showed more confidence than the Taiwanese group.
As for the quality of the ideas produced, the collectivists were superior to the individualists.
Saad explains that this is related to another important cultural trait of some collectitivist societies, it is a way of being more thoughtful in relation to those who are action-oriented, which translates into reflection long before taking action.
Studies like this are central to understanding how society conditions creativity and understanding increasingly obvious cultural differences, bearing in mind that the global economic center is increasingly shifting to Asia.
“To maximize the productivity of their international teams, global companies need to understand the important differences between Western and Eastern mindsets,” Saad says.
Research explains that brainstorming, a technique often used to produce innovative ideas as well as product innovations, may not be as effective in all cultural environments.
Saad also insists that while individuals in collectitivist societies contributed fewer creative ideas, the quality of these ideas was as good or better than that of individuals in individualistic societies.
Thus, everything seems to indicate that society conditions creativity in different ways, and this is an extremely interesting area of human behavior in which much remains to be discovered and understood.