prior experience together to have formed distinct
trust perceptions. To compose the pairs, we used an
algorithm that we had developed to minimize the difference of mutual trust between partners in a pair
and maximize it among pairs. A betting mechanism
was also included to gauge partner confidence in each
pair’s prospects. (For more detail on the procedures
employed, see “About the Research,” p. 34.)
The results point to a major finding: As mutual
trust increases, the partnership’s creativity goes up,
reaches a maximum point and then starts to decline.
(See “The Sweet Spot of Mutual Trust.”) To control for
the inherent creativity of individual participants in the
experiment, we considered not the individuals’ creativity but the pairs’ creativity arising from the partnership.
The difference between the two was termed “
partnership effectiveness.”
Partnership Effectiveness as
a Function of Mutual Trust
As the level of trust increases, effectiveness rises to a
maximum level and thereafter decreases. As trust
gets very high, effectiveness even goes negative.
As expected, there was also a strong correlation
between trust in the partner and the amount bet in
the partnership, suggesting that trusting partners
are more likely to commit the resources needed to
implement jointly developed ideas. If innovation is
the combination of creativity and commitment to
bring new ideas to fruition, then innovativeness in
a joint venture is the partnership payoff resulting
from the combination of the partners’ commitment and their respective creativity gains.
If we define innovativeness as the amount that
an individual gains on his investment thanks to the
creativity realized from cooperation with his partner, we can quantify its value as the product of an
individual’s initial investment (amount bet) and
creativity gained (percentage difference between an
individual’s creativity and the pair’s creativity). So
if those betting 300 euros exhibit high creativity
(say, twice their own creativity), they will obtain
600 euros as a payoff. By contrast, if a player betting
120 euros experiences a creativity loss in the partnership (say, 50% lower than his own), he will only
get 60 euros back. When we plot the average payoff
as a function of the pair’s mutual trust, we observe
another bell-shaped curve.
Innovativeness as a Function
of Combined Mutual Trust
Although innovativeness, like partnership effectiveness, also decreases after passing an optimal
point, its values are higher than those realized at
lower levels of trust.
Our findings show, as one would expect, that
low trust is not conducive to innovation. But coun-terintuitively, too much trust is bad for innovation
too. As mutual trust goes up, innovativeness increases, but only to a certain point ( 9. 5 on our trust
scale). Afterward, innovativeness declines, even
though it stays at higher levels because of greater
commitment. Creativity gains, on the other hand,
can become negative (creativity loss) for very high
levels of mutual trust. There seems to be an optimal
level of trust, above or below which innovativeness
or creativity is impeded.
Moderate Trust Could Be the Most Effective We
can explain this seemingly strange pattern by observing how conflicts affect team performance. According
to some management thinkers, tension does not always play a negative role in team dynamics. 12 Indeed,
while relational conflicts (which may arise, for example, from personal contempt for one or more team
members) are extremely detrimental to team performance, task-oriented conflicts are beneficial because
they foster critical thinking and in-depth analysis of
the team’s goals and actions. From our findings, we
could say that low levels of trust cause relational conflicts, while high levels of trust may induce a
reduction in task-oriented conflicts.
According to this analysis, participants who do
not trust each other experience relational conflict,
which prevents them from working together efficiently. If, on the other hand, a team enjoys a high
level of trust and mutual caring, individuals might
become too accommodating, quickly accepting
their partners’ ideas and thus reducing the amount
of dynamic task-oriented conflict. The team would
then have lower creative tension, consequently reducing the partnership’s effectiveness.
Trust is a combination of integrity, reliability
and mutual caring, and each component is likely to
play a different role in creativity and innovativeness. We can expect integrity and reliability to
generally favor joint problem solving and innova-
