Essays on the Effects of Incentive Framing and Power Distance Belief on Creativity

Creativity is central to growth and success in marketing. And yet, the effective managerial tools to motivate creative thinking for individuals remains underexplored by academics and practitioners. In this dissertation, I investigate the effect of incentive framing and power distance belief (PDB) on creativity. In my first essay, I examine how the framing of financial incentives affects creativity. Using a series of lab experiments, aided by biometric analysis, I obtain three major insights. First, loss framing of financial incentives promotes greater persistence and greater overall production of ideas in creativity tasks, compared to gain framing of financial incentives. Second, there is no difference, however, in the effects of loss framing and gain framing on the creativity of ideas. To understand this null effect of loss framing on creativity, I analyze emotions of participants using facial expressions, in a non-intrusive manner using computerized software. A third and crucial finding is that the null effect of loss framing is caused by two independent mediation effects through persistence and negative emotions that counteract each other: increased persistence as the result of loss framing and its positive effect on creativity is negated by the countervailing effect of negative emotions engendered by loss-framed incentives. In the second essay, I take a cultural perspective on creativity. Specifically, I seek to understand how and why an important cultural dimension, power distance belief (PDB), affects creativity. I first obtain a negative association between PDB and creativity, in that countries with lower PDB indicators show lower scores on the global innovation index. Using three lab experiments, I demonstrate, with both correlational data and causal evidence, that PDB negatively affects individual creativity by enhancing their self-control. Additionally, there is a boundary condition to this relationship. When a creativity task requires convergent thinking, PDB would promote, rather than inhibit, individuals’ creativity