The More, the Better? The Impact of Incentive Type and Feedback When Motivating Creativity

• In Event: Motivating Multidimensional Performance

Abstract

Creativity is the lifeblood of 21st century companies, but creativity is difficult to incentivize because greater effort does not necessarily improve creative output. In addition, individuals have a poor understanding of their level of creativity. In an examination of incentives on creative output, Kachelmeier et al. (2008) find that paying for quantity of output yields the same level of highly creative output as paying for only creativity or for both creativity and quantity. This is in stark contrast to economic theory, which suggests that a multi-dimensional incentive system that rewards both creativity and quantity will lead to superior output. As individuals are inherently bad at assessing their own creative ability, feedback may enable them to better adapt their strategies such that their output improves under incentives as economic theory would suggest.
Our study, therefore, examines the effect of feedback on creative output when incentives either incentivize creativity-only, quantity-only, or both creativity and quantity in a task that employs rebus puzzles. We find that even after feedback quantity-only incentives still outperform other forms of compensation. In addition, after feedback we find higher most creative output (most creative rebus puzzle) and highly creative output (top 25% most creative rebus puzzles) for incentives that have a quantity component (e.g. quantity-only and weighted incentives) compared to fixed and creativity-only incentives. This is noteworthy, because it shows most creative output is responsive to incentives over time.

Authors

• Alisa Gabrielle Brink, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Bernhard E. Reichert, Virginia Commonwealth University