Effects of real-time feedback and goal-setting on electronic brainstorming task performance

Abstract

Electronic brainstorming systems have been used as idea management toolkits within various organisations to improve creativity and develop innovative ideas. Yet, these systems have been shown to have diverse levels of success within organisations, with the main difference in the success of the systems being attributed to the interface utilisation of design principles and organisation cultures. It has been suggested that when perceived as informational, the design principles within such a system, such as points, leader boards, and reaching a goal may afford feelings of competence and hence enhance intrinsic motivation and may even improve task performance. Computer-mediated communication has been found to overcome some of the limitations within traditional brainstorming groups, and have even shown improvement in the idea-generation process over traditional methods. A two-by-two factorial online experiment was conducted with professional business students, to systematically examine how performance feedback and explicit goals, as well as the participants' self-perceived sense of autonomy, competence affects task performance (quantity and quality) of an individual or groups. The findings are in line with previous research on the effectiveness of computer-mediated group brainstorming and are also equivalent with respect to the task performance (quantity and quality) of idea-generation. One of the recommendations for improving this task performance of individual or groups is based on mutual cognitive stimulation, which assumes that reading others’ ideas could lead to satisfying a self requirement for psychological needs. Real-time feedback was found to intrinsically motivate participant towards improving their task performance, as where the setting of explicit goals showed no significant effects on task performance. Furthermore, no effect was observed with regards to social comparison between individual and group feedback setting, regardless of which design principles were applied.