Organizations frequently use teams for creative problem-solving. Evaluating the performance of creative teams based on customer-related accounting data, such as client satisfaction measures, revenues, or profits, clarifies which kind of creativity is expected from the team and potentially makes the creative process more effective. However, the use of such accounting data in performance evaluations may amplify the tensions between the artistic merit and the commercial success of creative ideas and, thus, create conflicts that undermine team creativity. We argue that it depends on the team leader's leadership style whether the negative or positive effects of using customer-related data in performance evaluations on team creativity will prevail. If the team leader shows a leadership style that helps team members internalize the values and standards underlying the employed performance measures, then negative conflict inside the team is avoided and the positive effects of using customer-related data in performance evaluations can be realized.

In the creative industries, creative output is often produced in temporary project teams, staffed with employees from within the organization. In this study we make two main contributions regarding the management of creative performance in such teams. First, we provide evidence for a fundamental trade-off inherent in creative teamwork. Team creativity benefits both from high team member autonomy and high task interdependence, but when team leaders give higher autonomy to team members then this undermines the positive effect of a more interdependent design of teamwork on team creativity, and vice versa. Second, we argue that cultural control at the organizational level is an effective means to resolve this team-level trade-off and to enable teams to leverage both high autonomy and high task interdependence for higher team creativity. We test our hypotheses using survey data collected at three different organizational levels (team members, team leaders, and agency heads) from 372 individuals of 101 temporary project teams within 53 advertising agencies, and find evidence consistent with our predictions.