A university experiment comparing the creative thinking of Taiwanese and Canadian students has found that while the Canadians generated more ideas, the Taiwanese ideas were better.
Gad Saad a behavioral scientist and professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, Concordia graduate student Louis Ho and University of Western Ontario associate professor of marketing Mark Cleveland wanted to test a stereotype of Western and Asian thinking.
The stereotype is that the West is a hub of creativity, innovation and product development, while Asian countries tend to focus on one idea and perfect existing products.
The researchers expected students from Canada’s “individualistic culture” to do well on innovative thinking and expected students from Taiwan’s “collectivist culture” to be less likely to show out-of-the-box thinking so as not to stand out from the group.
“With respect to individualism versus collectivism, we thought individuals from Canada would be more likely to express themselves, would be less concerned about criticisms, would be more focused on individual achievement, more likely to generate more ideas and higher quality ideas,” Cleveland said.
However, it turned out that while the Canadians were more productive, their ideas were of lesser quality, he said.
“That goes against what we hypothesized,” he said.
A total of about 300 students from the two nations were broken up into teams of four to brainstorm two questions judged to be culturally neutral and concerning subjects that the students were not likely to have thought about beforehand: “How would you attract tourists to an underwater city?” and “What would be the practical benefits of a second thumb?”
“Affirming the individualistic and collectivistic character of the Canadian and Taiwanese samples, the quantity of ideas generated was substantially higher for Canadians whereas the quality and originality of ideas generated was higher for Taiwanese,” says an abstract of the study, which will be published next month by the Journal of Business Research.
Canadian teams produced about twice as many ideas as the Taiwanese teams. The Canadians were also more confident in supporting their own ideas and more ready to criticize their teammates’ ideas.
While the Taiwanese were reluctant to criticize other team members, the judges gave their ideas higher marks for originality.
Saad said the Taiwanese ideas might have been superior because students from collectivist societies tend to be more reflective and to think hard before committing to a course of action.
“To maximize the productivity of their international teams, global firms need to understand important cultural differences between Western and Eastern mindsets,” Saad said.
“Brainstorming, a technique often used to generate novel ideas such as new product innovations, might not be equally effective across cultural settings,” he said.
“Even though individuals from collectivistic societies might be coming up with fewer creative ideas, the quality of those ideas tends to be just as good as or marginally better than those of their individualistic counterparts,” he said. “Employers need to recognize that.”
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