European inventory of
societal values of culture

Chua, Roth & Lemoine - The Impact of Culture on Creativity

Chua, R. Y. J., Roth, Y., & Lemoine, J.-F. (2015). The Impact of Culture on Creativity: How Cultural Tightness and Cultural Distance Affect Global Innovation Crowdsourcing Work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 60(2): 189–227.

This article responds to an understudied aspect of the ever-increasing scholarly interest in how culture impacts creativity. It advances a new theoretical model of how culture impacts creativity in a global context. The authors theorise that creativity, engagement, and success depend on what they describe as ‘cultural tightness’. This notion is defined as the extent to which a country is characterised by strong social norms and low tolerance for deviant behaviours. Using field data from a global online creative crowdsourcing platform, the authors found that individuals from tight cultures are less likely than their 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 country and the audience’s country increases. Additionally, the authors found that tight cultures are less receptive to foreign creative ideas. However, contrary to what current theorising would predict, they also found that in the cases of individuals innovating in their own or culturally close countries, cultural tightness increases the likelihood of engagement and success.