Strategies to improve selection of creative ideas: An experimental test of epistemic and social motivation in groups

Abstract

Pre-implementation activities like idea selection play a crucial role in the innovation process. However, groups of people seem to perform rather poorly when it comes to selecting creative ideas for implementation. The Motivated Information Processing in Groups model (MIP-G) provides an explanation as to why some groups outperform others when it comes to making group decisions. On the basis of the MIP-G framework, we hypothesized that groups that are both epistemically and prosocially motivated would outperform other groups in selecting creative ideas. Contrary to our hypothesis, a 2 × 2 experiment in a field sample (N = 240 or 80 three-person groups) showed that under conditions of high epistemic motivation, proself motivated groups selected significantly more creative and original ideas than prosocial groups. Proself motivated groups did not differ significantly from the prosocial motivated groups in selecting feasible ideas under conditions of high epistemic motivation. Our results suggest that the MIP-G framework may need refinement to increase our future understanding of group idea selection. To this end, we propose three specific avenues for future research.