Promoting group creative performance by enhancing motivation to cooperate: Mechanisms at the behavioral and neural levels

Abstract

Close collaboration is widely acknowledged to be imperative for fostering excellent creative performance and ensuring group success. However, limited research has been conducted on motivating group members to collaborate closely in creative tasks. This study aimed to examine whether enhancing motivation to cooperate could effectively facilitate collaboration and enhance performance in creative groups, while simultaneously exploring the underlying mechanisms associated with these effects. A total of 108 participants were randomly assigned to dyads to work together on an open ended idea generation task. Following previous studies, motivation to cooperate was manipulated using group-(high motivation to cooperate) or individual-based (low motivation to cooperate) reward structures. Ratings of creative performance, indicators of collaboration quality at the behavioral level, and hemodynamic interbrain synchrony (IBS) were compared between the two experimental conditions, and the mediating effect of the members’ characteristics was tested. The results showed that groups with high motivation to cooperate exhibited significantly higher originality, higher flexibility, higher willingness to cooperate, lower perceived competition, and a significant increase in interbrain synchrony in the prefrontal cortex than groups with low motivation to cooperate. The results demonstrated that when promised a group-based reward, group members engaged in closer collaboration and exhibited higher levels of originality and flexibility in their work. The implementation of motivation to cooperate is particularly effective for groups comprising individuals with low or medium openness. Furthermore, cognitive control appeared to play a crucial role in augmenting the quality of cooperation.