This Editors' Forum – ‘Creativity East and West’ – presents five papers on the question of cultural differences in creativity from the perspective of different research literatures, followed by two integrative commentaries. The literatures represented include historiometric, laboratory, and organizational studies. Investigation of cultural influences through country comparisons and priming manipulations, focusing on how people perform creatively and how they assess creativity. This introduction notes parallels in the findings across these research perspectives, suggesting some cultural universals in creativity and some systematic differences. Many differences can be explained in terms of the model that creativity means a solution that is both novel/original and useful/appropriate, yet that Western social norms prioritize novelty whereas Eastern norms prioritize usefulness – an account which predicts cultural differences would arise in contexts that activate social norms. The commentaries elaborate this argument in terms of processes – at the micro cognitive level and at the macro societal level – through which creativity occurs.

What are the fundamental factors that promote highly influential creativity? How do these factors differ in Western and Far Eastern civilizations? Many researchers have addressed these questions using historiometrics, a method that tests nomothetic hypotheses about human behaviour by subjecting historical and biographical data to objective and quantitative analyses. These investigations may entail either aggregate-level analyses (e.g., generational time series of creative activity) or individual-level analyses (e.g., cross-sectional studies of creative achievement). Moreover, the empirical findings in each of these two approaches fall into two categories of East-West comparisons: (i) shared variables and convergent results and (ii) shared variables and divergent results. After reviewing representative findings in each of these categories, we discuss what the results imply about the nature of high-impact creativity in the East and West and also explore areas of potential future historiometric research.

The present article aims to answer the question of whether creativity is universal or culture-specific. We develop a conceptual framework that expands the existing knowledge in two ways. First, it distinguishes between the two dimensions of creativity – novelty and usefulness, and their relationship to culture. Second, it clarifies how the social context moderates the relationship between culture and creativity. We focus on the social context where cultural differences are likely to be more salient because of the presence of others, relative to the private work context where no one observes whether a person performs in a normative or a unique way. In addition, we propose that task structure, whether a task is tightly or loosely structured, is an important contextual characteristic that moderates the relationship between culture and creativity. Lastly, we offer several propositions to guide future research.

Bicultural individuals vary in the degree to which their two cultural identities are integrated. Among Asian-Americans, for instance, some experience their Asian and American sides as compatible whereas others experience them as conflicting. Past research on judgments finds this individual difference affects the way bicultural individuals respond to situations that cue their cultures. Asian-Americans with high bicultural identity integration (BII) assimilate to norms of the cued culture (e.g., they exhibit typically American judgments when in situations that cue American culture), whereas Asian-Americans with low BII do the opposite, contrasting against the cue (e.g., they exhibit typically Asian judgments when in American situations). We investigated whether this dynamic similarly affects creative performance, which differs cross-culturally in that novelty is encouraged more by American than East Asian norms. In two experiments, we found that cues to American (vs. Asian) culture increase the novelty of solutions in divergent thinking tasks for Asian-Americans with high BII (assimilative response) yet decrease it for Asian-Americans with low BII (contrastive response). We discuss theoretical implications for culture and creativity research and practical implications for firms seeking to foster creativity.

In this article, we first review cross-cultural research, especially that concerning similarities and differences between East Asian and Western cultures, on creativity using laboratory tasks and tests. On the basis of this review, we then propose some directions for future cross-cultural research on creativity in the workplace. We emphasize the need to theorize why cultural differences make a difference in creativity and directly investigate, rather than assume, effects of contextual factors on creativity. In this regard, two literatures on creativity – cross-cultural studies using laboratory tasks and organizational studies of employee creativity – can benefit tremendously from integration. We also call for more empirical research examining effects of culture on creativity in the workplace, especially in China.

Laboratory studies of culture and creativity typically rely upon measures of divergent thinking while studies of creativity in organizational settings explicitly define creativity and use subject matter experts as assessors to account for the influence of culture on the assessment of creativity. Yet, little is known about what specific characteristics of a creative idea are considered when creativity is assessed by communities of experts (the field) in different spheres of creative activities (domain). In this article, we review, conceptually analyse, and illustrate using original interview data the influence of culture on the assessment of two commonly examined dimensions of overall creativity, novelty, and usefulness. Using the context of expatriates, we propose a framework, along with propositions, that integrates cultural experience, creativity criteria, and assessor perspectives on creativity assessment. Finally, we discuss ways in which a focus upon the processes underlying creativity assessments could help advance research on culture and creativity.

In commenting on the articles in this Editors' Forum, three questions are addressed: (i) how should we operationalize and measure creative outputs to enable a sound analysis of cross-cultural differences in creativity; (ii) could it be that culture impacts not only the valuation of originality and usefulness but also the psychological processes through which original yet useful ideas and insights are achieved; and (iii) does culture impact the domains in which individuals are more or less motivated to perform creatively? Using recent work on creativity as a starting point, and the key findings reported in this Editors' Forum, I propose that new research on culture and creativity would benefit from separating creative products from creative processes, and would do justice to the nature and functionality of cultures by asking not only when and how individuals and groups achieve creativity, but also why they would bother to be creative in the first place.

The articles in this forum present many innovative ideas on the role of culture in creativity. In this commentary, we first discuss the contributions of these articles in relation to two recurrent themes: (i) where creativity resides and (ii) what conceptual refinements are needed to push the field forward. Next, we oudine a process model of creativity and explain the role of culture at each stage of knowledge creation. We argue that successful innovation involves one or more iterations of the following three stages: (i) authoring new ideas; (ii) selecting, editing, and marketing new ideas; and (iii) acceptance of the new ideas in the market. The desired outcomes are different at the different stages, and culture influences all stages of the process. Specifically, existing knowledge provides a reference point for evaluating the originality of ideas; assumed cultural consensus provides the normative basis for idea selection, editing, and marketing; and actual cultural norms determine how likely an idea will be accepted in a culture. Furthermore, different social and psychological processes are at work at different stages of the creativity process, and culture can affect the outcomes of the creativity process through its effects on these social and psychological processes.