Summary
Rewards can energize creative work, but they also change how team members respond to one another’s ideas. In a controlled experiment with 80 teams, Matthias Felix Sinnemann, Matthias Michael Weiss, and Julia Backmann found that individual-only and team-only rewards were associated with more early idea rejection than a mixed reward structure that combined individual and team outcomes. Teams with mixed rewards also produced the strongest overall creative output. The study shifts attention from the quality of the final list to what disappears during the discussion. An incentive can increase effort while also narrowing a team’s search before unconventional ideas have been developed enough to judge.
The Ideas That Never Make the List
Leaders typically see the ideas a team submits, recommends, or implements. They rarely hear the unfinished suggestion that drew silence, the unusual proposal that seemed impractical, or the alternative the group abandoned as time ran short. Yet promising ideas seldom enter a discussion ready for approval. Their value often emerges only after team members question, extend, and combine them with other contributions.
This makes the timing of evaluation critical. Rejection can be useful later, when a team must choose where to invest. Sinnemann and colleagues examined an earlier stage, when team members were asked only to generate possibilities. At that point, dropping an idea removes material that might have become useful through refinement or recombination. The team may never know what it lost.
Why Rewards Change Team Discussion
Managers often assume that individual rewards encourage effort and healthy competition, while team rewards direct attention toward a shared result. The researchers asked a more specific question: How does each reward structure shape what teams do with one another’s ideas during brainstorming? They expected individual rewards to increase rejection and team rewards to reduce it. A mixed structure, which combined personal and collective outcomes, could plausibly pull the team in either direction.
The researchers randomly assigned 290 participants at a German public university to 80 teams of three or four people. Each team completed two 20-minute idea-generation tasks, one focused on improving a university canteen and another on redesigning a backpack. Some teams received no reward. In the individual condition, the two strongest contributors could earn money. In the team condition, every member could receive an equal share if the group ranked among the top-performing teams. The mixed condition combined smaller individual and team rewards.
Video recordings allowed the researchers to identify ideas that were voiced but then actively discontinued. Independent judges assessed the novelty and usefulness of the ideas teams retained. This design made visible a part of creative work that final submissions conceal. Because participants were not asked to rank or select ideas, the observed rejections reflected spontaneous evaluation during generation, not a formal decision stage.
New Findings with Implications for Team Creativity
Early idea rejection carried a creative cost. Teams that rejected more ideas produced lower overall creative output. Additional analyses clarified where the loss occurred. Rejection was not associated with lower average quality among the ideas that survived. Instead, teams produced fewer ideas, explored fewer categories, and generated fewer highly creative ideas. Premature rejection narrowed the search before the strongest possibilities could emerge.
The reward findings challenged the assumption that a shared incentive naturally keeps teams open to one another’s ideas. Individual rewards increased rejection, as expected. Team-only rewards were also associated with elevated rejection and produced significantly more rejection than mixed rewards. The mixed-reward teams averaged 3.63 actively rejected ideas, compared with 7.95 under individual rewards and 7.23 under team rewards. They also produced the highest overall creative output.
The researchers offered a possible explanation for this pattern. Individual rewards may encourage members to defend their own contributions and scrutinize competing ideas. Team rewards may create a different pressure to protect consensus and avoid proposals that appear risky to the group’s result. Mixed rewards may temper both tendencies by preserving room for individual advocacy while maintaining responsibility for the team’s performance. The study inferred these motives rather than measuring them directly, so this explanation remains provisional.
Exploratory analyses added two useful clues. Mixed rewards were associated with deeper consideration of the information team members shared. Rejection was most common at moderate levels of elaboration, when teams examined ideas enough to criticize them but not enough to improve or integrate them. The researchers also found that ideas rejected later in the discussion tended to be more novel and less useful than those rejected earlier. As teams shifted toward convergence, novelty became especially vulnerable.
The social tone of rejection did not change the central pattern. Whether a rejection was reasoned and encouraging or unreasoned and dismissive, the study found no evidence that its form systematically altered the relationship between rejection and creativity. This does not establish that tone is unimportant for trust or future participation. It shows that a politely discarded idea was still removed from the creative pool in these tasks.
What This Means for Leaders
Leaders should evaluate creative incentives by what they produce inside the conversation, not only by the final ideas or the energy they generate. An individual bonus may stimulate effort while encouraging members to privilege their own contributions. A team bonus may align outcomes while making the group cautious about ideas that could threaten consensus. When creative work depends on both initiative and integration, a balanced reward design is worth testing.
The study does not justify copying its reward formula. The experiment involved mostly young university students, short laboratory tasks, and teams without a formal hierarchy or shared history. The mixed condition may also have seemed to offer a greater chance that someone would receive a reward. Leaders should treat the finding as a design hypothesis, then test whether a mix of individual and collective recognition improves the way their own teams develop ideas. Individual recognition could also acknowledge contributions that strengthen another person’s idea, not only the origination of a winning proposal.
Discussion design matters alongside reward design. Leaders can separate generation from evaluation and make the transition explicit. During generation, a team might restate an idea, identify what is promising, and propose one extension before setting it aside. Ideas that are not ready can remain visible in a holding list for later review. Once the team moves to selection, it can apply clear criteria for usefulness, feasibility, and strategic fit. This preserves exploration without asking teams to avoid judgment.
Leaders should also protect the closing minutes of an ideation session. Time pressure can turn convergence into an unexamined preference for the familiar. Before finalizing the list, teams can revisit ideas with high novelty but uncertain usefulness and ask what would need to change for them to become workable. Monitoring which ideas disappear, who proposed them, and why they were dropped can reveal whether the process is integrating perspectives or screening them out too soon.
Keeping Ideas Alive Long Enough
Rewards are part of a team’s information environment. They influence whose contributions receive attention and how quickly the group moves from exploration to judgment. Sinnemann and colleagues showed that leaders miss an important part of creative performance when they look only at submitted ideas. Teams need incentives and discussion practices that keep unfinished ideas available long enough to determine their value.
Access the full research paper here: Sinnemann, M. F., Weiss, M. M., & Backmann, J. (2026). Rewarded to reject? Exploring motivational roots of idea rejection in teams. Journal of Organizational Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.70120
