Cooperative Controversy: When Criticism Enhances Creativity in Brainstorming and Negotiation

Long-standing wisdom holds that criticism is antithetical to effective brainstorming, yet a number of recent studies have challenged this assumption. Our paper reconciles these perspectives with new theory to explain when and why criticism promotes brainstorming effectiveness. We propose that a cooperative context allows criticism to spur creativity without inciting intragroup conflict, whereas a competitive context makes criticism more divisive, impeding creativity. We find support for this theory from a field experiment in the context of a real-world public dispute involving 422 stakeholders comprising 100 group brainstorming sessions. In a follow-up scenario study we replicate this effect in the context of a negotiation setting while holding constant the nature of the criticism and using a different experimental manipulation of cooperativeness versus competitiveness. This second study involved the use of a natural language processing algorithm to code 1,778 ideas from 430 participants to resolve a wage dispute between Union and Management.