Membership change has been found to stimulate collective idea generation but to not always benefit group creativity—the generation of final outcomes that are novel and useful. Based on motivated information processing theory, we propose that membership change challenges group members to generate more ideas, but that this only contributes to group creativity when members have high levels of prosocial motivation and are willing to process and integrate each other’s ideas. In a laboratory study of 56 student groups, we found that incremental, but not radical, idea generation mediated the positive effect of membership change on group creativity, and only when group members were prosocially motivated. The present study points to different roles of incremental versus radical ideas and underscores the importance of accounting for prosocial motivation in groups for reaping the benefits of membership change in relation to group creativity.

已经发现，成员资格的变化可以激发集体想法的产生，但并不总是有益于团体的创造力-产生新颖而有用的最终结果。基于动机信息处理理论，我们建议成员变更会挑战小组成员以产生更多的想法，但这仅在成员具有较高的亲社会动机并愿意处理和整合彼此的想法时才有助于小组创造力。在对56个学生团体的实验室研究中，我们发现渐进的想法产生（而不是激进的）产生了成员资格改变对小组创造力的积极影响，并且仅在小组成员出于社会动机的情况下才发挥作用。