Prior research has produced conflicting views on whether incentives help or hinder innovation. This paper takes a more fine-grained view arguing that the innovation process consists of various interrelated behaviors where the primary role of incentives is not to motivate employees to work harder but rather to support behaviors that are considered effective for generating innovation outcomes. We point at two key innovation behaviors, knowledge exchange and distal search, and argue that they complement each other in driving innovation. Because of this complementarity, the question arises of how to design incentives that simultaneously motivate both behaviors effectively. We propose that adequately designed explicit incentives support knowledge exchange, while implicit career incentives focus the individual’s attention on future tasks and, by doing so, effectively support behavior that opens up distant sources of knowledge. Overall, our study provides a new theoretical argument for why explicit and implicit incentives are interdependent choices within innovation processes. We test our hypotheses combining survey data with patent data from 282 firms in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.

Organizations that rely heavily on employee creativity face a dilemma: the particular nature of creative production calls for a substantial use of formal control, yet such control can undermine employee creativity. We examine this dilemma by analyzing how an organization's reliance on creativity influences its choice of control practices. More specifically, we argue that an organization's high reliance on employee creativity generates two types of cost, which will be reflected in the control choices made by its top management. First, a high reliance on employee creativity brings with it particular risks of dysfunctional employee behavior such as an overly narrow focus on the individual task or the opportunistic use of task-specific expertise. Second, it generates costs when it induces organizations to abstain from the use of (otherwise effective) controls because such controls increase the risk of undermining employee creativity. We identify two characteristics of the work setting – the importance of employees' intrinsic task motivation and the lack of task-specific cause–effect knowledge on part of managers – which help us to better understand the sources of the cost of creativity. Using survey data from 457 companies, we provide evidence that the importance managers attach to their employees' intrinsic task motivation is associated with a higher emphasis on assessments of non-task related performance, while a perceived lack of task-specific cause–effect knowledge on the managers' side is associated with more use of predefined targets for performance evaluation. Both work characteristics contribute to explaining higher emphasis on employee selection processes and increased delegation in work settings that heavily rely on employee creativity.

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.