Data for: The effect of manipulating group task orientation and support for innovation on collaborative creativity in an educational setting

This study investigates the effects of group task orientation and support for innovation, two of the four dimensions of group climate identified by West (1990) as instrumental to team creativity, on the creativity of group solutions to a set of open-ended problems. Participants were N=295 high school students in China working in 60 collaborative groups (formed by self-affiliation) to solve four tasks used in prior creativity research. Rewards were used to manipulate the team climate factors of task orientation and support for innovation between groups in a 2 x 2 design. Task orientation, defined as a shared concern with excellence of group performance, was manipulated by informing some groups (but not others) in advance about both monetary and social performance rewards. Support for innovation, the expectation of and support for unique ideas, was manipulated by describing to some groups in advance an aspect of the scoring rule that rewarded originality (defined as unique answers to the tasks). The group responses to the tasks were scored on three dimensions often used to define creativity: fluency, flexibility, and originality. Summary: The data is in the form of an SPSS .sav file. The 295 participants were Chinese high-school students working in N=60 collaborative groups. In this data set, the aggregated group-level data are reported. The data set arises from a 2 x 2 factorial MANOVA design, with 3 summary dependent variables ( AveFluency, AveFlexibility, and AveOriginality) used to measure the creativity of group solutions to four standard creativity tasks. Two independent raters scored the test results on the three outcome dimensions; average results from the two raters were used in our primary analyses. The independent variables (MANOVA factors) are: support for innovation (Support: 0=no, 1=yes) and rewards for excellence (Excellence: 0=no performance rewards, 1=with performance rewards).