Differential Effects of Cultural Orientation on the Changes in Group Creativity

Abstract

Recently, Asian countries, including Korea and China, are rapidly changing from a traditional collectivist culture to an individualistic culture. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how individualism as an individual traits affects group creativity, which essentially requires social interaction. Under the background, we divided the cultural orientations of Chinese university students into the four types of Triandis (1995): vertical individualism, horizontal individualism, vertical collectivism, and horizontal collectivism. And then we constructed 4 homogeneous groups according to each types, and their group creativity was tested three times over an 8-week period. The results were first, in the last measurement, the groups with the highest group creativity were the horizontal collectivist team and the vertical individualistic team. Although the horizontal collectivist team had the lowest score among the four teams at the beginning, it continued to show a steep rise over time, showing the highest score in the last. The vertical individualist team started with a high score from the beginning and maintained a consistently high level. The vertical collectivist team seemed to maintain a high level of group creativity from the beginning to the middle, but showed a sharp decrease at the end. The horizontal individualism team showed low group creativity from the beginning and tended to keep it at a low level. This tendency was also supported by peer ratings and expert ratings. In the subsequent discussion, the causes of this tendency were analyzed, implications and limitations, and suggestions for future research were discussed.