Creativity and Corporate Culture

Creative problem-solving by corporations is frequently conducted within a group or a team framework. A relevant issue is to try to determine which type of corporate culture is most effective in enhancing performance in creative tasks. We present a series of experiments that aim at studying group creativity in contexts where corporate culture may tend to promote cooperation or competition among group members. Our experimental results show that cooperative corporate culture fosters creativity. We identify the reason for success as the emergence within the group of a social norm of high effort.