Incentives and Creativity in Groups — Experimental Evidence on Creative Processes and Dimensions

Creativity and teamwork are essential in today’s rapidly evolving labor market, yet little is known about how incentives shape creative group processes across multiple creativity dimensions, specifically quantity, quality, and originality. I introduce a novel verbal creative coordination task to incentivize and objectively measure these dimensions of creativity and to generate insights into the full creative group process. Thereby, this paper investigates how idea generation, evaluation, and selection can be effectively incentivized in Groups and which incentive scheme maximizes innovation—ideas that are both high in Quality and originality. In a laboratory experiment with 640 participants, groups are randomly assigned to a control or one of three group-level relative performance pay treatments targeting either quantity, quality, or originality. Results show that quantity incentives lead to broader exploration, increasing both the number and average originality of ideas, and outperform all other treatments on the combined indicator of innovative ideas. Quality incentives improve idea quality, while originality incentives fail to boost originality. Incentives mainly operate through higher individual effort rather than group dynamics. Across all conditions, the evaluation and selection phases act as a bottleneck, with highly original ideas systematically discarded. These findings highlight that maximizing creative Output requires incentives that promote exploration and structures that preserve original ideas.