The Impact of Culture on Creativity

Abstract

This paper advances a new theoretical model to understand the effect of culture on creativity in a global context. We theorize that creativity engagement and success depend on the cultural tightness-the extent to which a country is characterized by strong social norms and low tolerance for deviant behaviorsof both an innovator's country and the audience's country, as well as the cultural distance between these two countries. Using field data from a global online crowdsourcing platform that organizes creative contests for consumerproduct brands, supplemented by interviews with marketing experts, we found that individuals from tight cultures are less likely than counterparts from loose cultures to engage in and succeed at foreign creative tasks; this effect is intensified as the cultural distance between the innovator's and the audience's country increases. Additionally, tight cultures are less receptive to foreign creative ideas. But we also found that in certain circumstances-when members of a tight culture do creative work in their own or culturally close countriescultural tightness can actually promote creativity success. This finding implies that some degree of convergent thinking as engendered by tight cultures could be beneficial for creativity, challenging the dominant view in creativity research that divergent thinking is a prerequisite for creative performance.

How culture gets embrained: Cultural differences in event-related potentials of social norm violations

“…After the EEG session, participants were asked to respond to a number of attitudinal and behavioral measures that have been shown to be related to the strength of social norms in previous research (1,2,15). Beliefs about the importance of territorial defense was assessed using a World Values Survey item "Government should maintain the defense of our territory," ranging from 1 (not at all important) to 7 (very much important) (39).…”

“…Compared with loose cultures, individuals in tight cultures have more self-control (1), prefer standard vs. creative solutions to tasks (2,15), place more importance on territorial defense (i.e., maintaining order in one's country), and are more ethnocentric (i.e., believe one's culture is superior to others and dislike deviants who threaten the social order) (1, 2)-human adaptations all of which invariably support and reinforce the strength of social norms. Such correlates of tightness-looseness have been found at the national and the state levels of analysis (1, 2), suggesting a trade-off of greater order, stability, and cohesion in tight groups but greater creativity and openness in loose groups.…”

Impact of national culture on innovation activities of companies: a case of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic

“…Culture has a profound infl uence on the innovative capacity, and it also provides social direction to the process of technological development ( Herbig & Dunphy 1998). According to the research conducted by Chua et al (2015), culture affects cross-border creativity engagement and success and has an impact on the innovator's ability to work creatively. In organisations, culture should also support the crea tivity, because, in general, creativity enhances innovative activities (Sarooghi et al, 2015).…”

Intra-Cultural Variation, Zone of Acceptance and Managerial Discretion: A Theoretical Discussion

“…Research has discovered that national contexts of tightness and looseness vary widely between countries and that such a construct is distinct from the actual cultural dimensions (Aktas et al, 2016;Gelfand et al, 2011). This construct has been linked to several organizational, managerial and national outcomes , such as negotiation (Gunia et al, 2011), stock-price synchronicity (Eun et al, 2015), job satisfaction for expatriate manpower (Peltokorpi and Froese, 2014), organizational creativity (Chua et al, 2015) and even terrorism (Gelfand et al, 2013). Recently, cultural-tightness and looseness have been linked to managerial discretion (Crossland and Hambrick, 2011).…”