It’s easy to think that innovation and creativity are largely intrinsic endeavors where our motivation should come from wanting to make a real difference in the world.  Research from Rice University suggests we should perhaps rethink this approach, however, and make better use of rewards to encourage creativity.

“Organizations spend a lot of resources and exert a great deal of effort in designing incentive schemes that reward the employees who exhibit creativity at work,” the researchers say. “Our results showed that the effort may be a bit misplaced. Instead of discovering one reward type that is particularly effective at promoting creativity, what is more effective is to provide the employees with the opportunity to choose from several reward types, if they submit one or more ideas that are among the top 20% most creative ones.”

Rewarding creativity

Participants in the study were given a number of options in an experiment designed to test the impact of rewards on their creativity.  Some volunteers were given a financial reward as either individuals or as a team, some were given a self-discretionary reward, such as a day off, while others were given money they could donate to a charity.

The choices appeared to have a significant impact on the number of creative ideas generated by the group and indeed the creativity level of each idea.

Perhaps the most powerful outcome appeared to be when rewards were pro-social, or in other words, were designed so that they would help others, such as the charitable donations, although the researchers point out that for those who were deemed less creative to begin with, this actually lowered their output.

So why did rewards help to boost creativity?  The researchers believe that it worked in large part because it raised the belief in the volunteers that they could actually be creative, which thus became self-fulfilling.  It’s an outcome that may well, of course, be achievable through other means, but for now at least, pro-social rewards may be something to consider.