Ethnic Heterogeneous Teams Outperform Homogeneous Teams on Well-defined but not Ill-defined Creative Task

Purpose – Due to its socio-cultural complexity, the impact of ethnic heterogeneous team on creative task is a two-edge sword. On one hand it will bring high cognitive stimulation and thus enhance creative production. On the other hand, it will lead to attention loading and thus determine concentration and creativity. In handling ill-defined task or well-defined task, the needed attention loading might not the same. Thus a question arises: will ethnic heterogeneous teams outperform ethnic homogenous in creative production on ill-defined and/or well-defined tasks? The paper aims to address this issue. Design – This paper presents an experimental study that compares ethnic heterogeneous teams (composed of both Danish and Chinese) with ethnic homogenous teams (composed of only Danish or only Chinese) on creative production. The characteristic of tasks is manipulated: welldefined or ill-defined creative task. Findings – The paper finds that heterogeneous teams get more creative production than homogenous teams in solving the well-defined task. No significant difference was found in the creative production for the ill-defined task. Value – The paper demonstrates that the creative production in ethnic heterogeneous teams will depend on the characteristic of the creative task. Paper type: Research paper.