Less is more: New VCU study shows giving workers less autonomy improves their creativity

By Leila Ugincius

Virginia Commonwealth University researchers are rethinking the “think outside the box” mentality when it comes to creativity.

Recently published research from the VCU School of Business shows that giving employees less freedom over their decisions can actually improve creativity. Specifically, when pay is tied to performance, letting employees choose which of their creative ideas to pursue backfires.

“It triggers a ‘good enough’ mindset that curtails breakthrough innovation,” said Bernhard Reichert, Ph.D., associate professor of accounting, who co-authored the paper, “Guardrails on the Creative Process: The Impact of Decision Rights and Incentives on Creativity,” published in Behavioral Research in Accounting.

The study shows that giving employees more guardrails actually benefits the creative process and leads to higher creativity. Limiting employee autonomy and having managers or a review committee — not the creators themselves — select which creative ideas move forward protects the fragile process of idea generation from other pressures.

“When designing creative processes and compensation structures, it is essential to understand the nature of a creative process, which differs from the process for producing mundane tasks,” said co-author Alisa Brink, chair of the VCU Department of Accounting and KPMG Teaching Excellence Professor. “It is counterintuitive. Often, we associate creativity with the necessity to have total autonomy.”

The findings are a powerful reminder that the operational process that managers use is as important as the people they hire or the incentives they give them, researchers said.

“Our findings give additional insights into why some constraints are good for the creative process — specifically, constraints that allow the employee to just focus on being creative,” Reichert said.

“Guardrails on the Creative Process” was co-authored by J. Matthew “Matt” Sarji, Ph.D., at Georgia Southern University and Erin Masters, Ph.D., at Northern Kentucky University, using data partially collected at VCU’s Experimental Laboratory for Economics and Business Research.