The present article aims to answer the question of whether creativity is universal or culture-specific. We develop a conceptual framework that expands the existing knowledge in two ways. First, it distinguishes between the two dimensions of creativity -novelty and usefulness, and their relationship to culture. Second, it clarifies how the social context moderates the relationship between culture and creativity. We focus on the social context where cultural differences are likely to be more salient because of the presence of others, relative to the private work context where no one observes whether a person performs in a normative or a unique way. In addition, we propose that task structure, whether a task is tightly or loosely structured, is an important contextual characteristic that moderates the relationship between culture and creativity. Lastly, we offer several propositions to guide future research.

Taking a constructivist, collaborative experiential learning approach to education and training of global managers, we designed an on-line, 4-week virtual multicultural team project and tested its effect on the development of management students' cultural intelligence, global identity, and local identity. The total sample of 1221 graduate management students, assigned to 312 virtual multicultural teams, consisted of four cohorts, each participating in one 4-week project; one project was conducted every year between 2008 and 2011. All projects were designed in the same way, according to principles of collaborative experiential learning, and offered a psychologically safe learning environment that enabled trust building. Data on cultural intelligence, global identity, and local identity were collected by way of web-based questionnaires at the beginning and at the end of the project, as well as 6 months later. Team trust was assessed in the middle of the project. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that cultural intelligence and global identity, but not local identity, significantly increased over time and that this effect lasted for 6 months after the project had ended. Trust as a team level factor moderated the project's effect on team members' cultural intelligence and global identity, with significant effects under moderate to high rather than low levels of trust.

This paper proposes that the social context moderates the effect of culture on creativity by drawing on the constructivist dynamic approach. We assess creativity by the level of fluency, originality, and elaboration on the usefulness and appropriateness of ideas in three contexts: working under a supervisor, in a group, and alone. We hypothesized that in high power distance cultures, working under a supervisor inhibits creativity, whereas in individualistic cultures, the presence of peers attenuates creativity. Results from two parallel experiments, one in the United States (N = 79) and the other in China (N = 83), partially support the hypotheses. The Chinese originality level was significantly lower when working under a supervisor than when working alone. American subjects generated fewer ideas and elaborated less when working in the presence of peers and elaborated less in the presence of peers than when under a supervisor. We conclude that the social context moderates the culture-creativity relationship by making consensual cultural values more accessible in a social context than when working alone.