By Melissa Pandika
culled from:http://www.ozy.com
Pressure yields diamonds — depending on your team.
Groups of men enjoy a boost in creativity when
pitted against other teams, according to researchers at Washington
University in St. Louis. But such cutthroat situations hurt creativity
in teams consisting mostly of women. The findings should warn managers
against heating up the competition to light the creative spark, the
researchers wrote in a study published in the May-June issue of Organizational Science.
Earlier research had shown that in noncompetitive
environments — where groups work alongside each other — teams made up
entirely of women worked more collaboratively than all-male teams. But
researchers know little about how gender makeup influences competition’s
effects on creativity.
“Men under those circumstances … become more interdependent and more collaborative, and women just do the opposite.”
To find out, the researchers recruited 360 WUSTL
undergrads and randomly divided them into 90 four-member teams tasked
with generating creative ideas for improving the transition from high
school to college for incoming freshmen.
The researchers then randomly assigned each team to
experience low, medium or high levels of competition. Those assigned to
the low competition condition were told that they needed to rank among
the top 50 percent of the most creative teams to stand a chance at
winning $4. At the other end of the spectrum, teams experiencing high
competition were told they needed to be the most creative group to win
$400. A separate group rated the creativity of each team’s ideas.
Teams consisting mostly of women tended to be more
creative than male-dominated teams — when the stakes were low. “As soon
as you add the element of competition, though, the picture changes,” said
Markus Baer, associate professor of organizational behavior at WUSTL’s
Olin Business School and the study’s lead author. “Men under those
circumstances [jell] together. They become more interdependent and more
collaborative, and women just do the opposite.” Although teams with a
higher proportion of men churned out more creative ideas when the
competition fired up, creativity declined in teams with mostly women.
All-female teams suffered the steepest drop-off.
Baer suspects that women disengage from the creative process because they “sense that others may not expect them to do well either.”
To test whether these findings held up in the real
world, the researchers also studied 50 teams at a global oil and gas
company. They asked each team’s supervisor and a few key members to rate
the team’s collaboration, creativity and competitiveness against other
teams. Sure enough, teams rated as highly competitive also ranked high
in creativity — if they included a higher proportion of men. The
opposite held true for teams of mostly women.
That doesn’t mean women can’t help but crumble in
the face of competition — just that gender stereotypes continue to shape
workplace behavior, Baer said. He suspects that women disengage from
the creative process because they “might see themselves as less
competitive and probably sense that others may not expect them to do well either.”
But since society expects men to thrive in competitive situations, men
“get more excited about the task at hand and fully engage it as well as
each other.”
The take-home lesson? Since competition could dampen
female employees’ creativity, managers should use different methods for
generating ideas, especially as women’s numbers grow in the workforce.
Companies could balance the competition with collaboration, asking teams
to share breakthroughs with each other or rotating members through
competing teams, for example.
Unlike simply turning the competition on blast,
tapping into the fount of brilliant ideas might require its own dose of
creativity.
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