Giving Credit for Creativity: Should an employee “own” a good idea?

You want to reward an employee for a good idea; that’s only natural.  Rewards are motivating after all, and compensating for good behavior breeds more good behavior.  Right?

Well, when it comes to rewarding creativity, don’t be too hasty.  Recent research indicates that you’ll get better results when you thank a team for innovations, rather than giving credit to a single individual.  When you identify a person as the solo author of a good idea, that person develops “psychological ownership”, or a feeling of possessiveness, toward the idea.  When you reward people for their creativity, this feeling of personal ownership gets stronger.  People start to think of the idea as “theirs”.  When that happens, they stop listening to other people’s suggestions for how to make it better.  They also resist sharing the idea with their co-workers or the company.

So while a feeling of personal ownership might be a nice psychological feeling for the person, it is actually really bad for the idea itself.  Researchers from Canada and the US discovered that not only do employees get defensive about their creative output, but co-workers also believe that they’re not supposed to contribute to it.  Instead, these peers started looking for ideas they could personally “own” rather than contributing to others developed jointly by the group.  The result?  SA lot of half-baked ideas everyone points to with personal pride that never really become anything valuable for the organization (or the individual, for that matter). 

So when an employee has a good idea, by all means thank them for their creativity.  But your next step should be to give a team of co-workers ownership of a new project to fully develop that idea.  When it becomes the norm for groups to work on innovation, you get fuller commitment and more cooperation.  For the best creativity, group or shared rewards and acknowledgement will bring the most valuable ideas to fruition.

Brown, G., & Baer, M. (2015).  Protecting the turf: The effect of territorial marking on others’ creativity.  Journal of Applied Psychology, 100, 1785-1797.