The Influence Of Cognitive Motivation And Social Motivation On Team Creativity

Along with enterprises and companies from the individual into a group, group has become the basic unit of the organization and group creativity has become the research hot spot. The traditional view is that the internal motivation can promote creativity, but only focusing on the internal motivation is far from enough. Some studies have found that the relationship between motivation and creativity is wack. Under the information age groups need to undertake a series of complex cognitive and decision-making process to complete the task. So it is necessary to know how motivation affect team creativity. The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of epistemic motivation and social motivation on group creativity, and the role of interaction including constructive controversy and group communication between motivation and group creativity.In study 1,126 college students were randomly formed 42 mixed gender groups. The epistemic motivation was manipulated by time pressure and the social motivation was manipulated by financial incentive. In higher epistemic condition, groups would had 15 minutes to generate ideas,and in the low epistemic motivation,groups had 5 minutes. In the pro-self condition, the instructions read that each group member’s contribution would be evaluated and the winners would get ＄25. In the pro-social condition, participants leaned that their overall performance would be evaluated, and the winning group which group creativity was highest would be rewarded ＄75. Then each group would complete the brainstorming task and questionnaire under diferent requirements. Through multiple factor variance analysis to explore the influence of epistemic motivation and social motivation on group creativity. In study 2,84 boys and 102 girls were randomly formed 28 male group and 34 female group.Through the factor analysis of variance to explore the influence of epistemic motivation and social motivation on group creativity in same gender groups; through correlation analysis and regression analysis, to explore the role of constructive controversy and group communication between motivation and group creativity.The study 1 results showed that the epistemic motivation and social motivation were started successfully. Variance analysis found that the effect for epistemic motivation and social motivation on creativity were significant; and the interaction of the epistemic motivation and social motivation was not significant. The high epistemic group’s ideas were significantly more fluency, novel and useful than the low epistemic group’s ideas; The pro-social group’s ideas were more novel than the pro-self group’s, but there was no difference on fluency and usefulness between the pro-social and pro-self group. The study 2 found that motivation had main effect on the group creativity, that is, the self-assessment group creativity of the high epistemic group under pro-social condition was significantly higher than the other three groups. In peer group creativity, high epistemic group under pro-self condition was higher than the other three groups. Gender had main effect on novelty, and the male group was higher than female group; Gender has main effect on usefulness, and the female group’s was more usefull than the male group’s. Variance analysis showed that motivation had main effect on the group interaction process. The high epistemic group under pro-social condition had more constructive controversy and group communication than the other three groups. Gender also had main effect on the group interaction, the female group had more constructive controversy and communication than the male group. Regression analysis results showed that the constructive controversy could positively predict group creativity, and total predictive power was 39.1%. In the same time,it played a mediator between motivation and group creativity, but group communication was not a mediator.The results indicates as follows:(1)Epistemic motivation and social motivation have significant influence on group creativity. Especially high epistemic group under pro-social condition creativity performance has better creativity performance and more constructive controversy and group communication than the other three groups. (2)Gender influence group creativity and the group interaction process. The male group makes more task exploration,less group interactions, thus the novelty is higher than the female group’s. The female groups have more constructive controversy and group communication than the male group, thus the usefulness of female group’s is better. (3)The effect of group interactions can’t be ignored, and constructive controversy and group communication can positively predict team creativity. The constructive controversy is a mediator between the motivation and group creativity, but not group communication.