Teams do not outperform individuals in a simple creative task

ABSTRACT

We compare the performance of teams with that of individuals in a simple creative task – generating a title for a short video. To measure performance, we assess the quality of titles using click rate as well as subjective assessment of the fit between the title and the video. Although teams are costlier to organizations, we find no significant differences in the performance of teams relative to that of individuals. As a result, in the task we use in this paper, allocating creative work to individuals is more efficient than allocating it to teams.

KEYWORDS:

• Creativity
• idea generation
• real effort
• experiment
• teams vs. individuals

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C90
• O30
• J24
• M50

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ These types of tasks are a big business; for instance, the world’s 10 biggest advertising agencies had a combined gross income of more than $25 billion in 2017, with many of their services revolving around creativity (https://co.agencyspotter.com/50-largest-marketing-companies-in-the-world).

² See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwgtwY3oL4g&feature=youtu.be for the video.

³ In Table A1 in the appendix, we provide an analysis based only on the first wave of data collection.

⁴ We always report two-tailed p-values.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [FOR 1371].