How creative are you? Depends where you're from

Quality vs quantity

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-01/cu-hca012715.php

Public Release: 27-Jan-2015
Concordia University

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The study, recently published in the Journal of Business Research, compared nearly 300 individuals from Taiwan, a collectivist society, and Canada, a more individualistic country. Results show that those from individualist societies generate a greater number of ideas as compared to their collectivist counterparts - though the cultures were on nearly equal footing when it came to the quality of that creative output.

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"We found that the individualists came up with many more ideas. They also uttered more negative statements -- and those statements were more strongly negative. The Canadian group also displayed greater overconfidence than their Taiwanese counterparts."

But when it came to the quality of ideas produced, the collectivists scored marginally higher than the individualists.

"This is in line with another important cultural trait that some collectivist societies are known to possess -- namely being more reflective as compared to action-oriented, having the reflex to think hard prior to committing to a course of action," Saad says.

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"Brainstorming, a technique often used to generate novel ideas such as new product innovations, might not be equally effective across cultural settings. Even though individuals from collectivistic societies might be coming up with fewer creative ideas, the quality of those ideas tends to be just as good as or marginally better than those of their individualistic counterparts. Employers need to recognize that."

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