Abstract
Research with U.S. samples has consistently found that intrinsic motivation is conducive to producing creative work, while extrinsic motivation is detrimental to producing creative work. The goal of this research was to determine if this remained true in another more collectivist culture. This was a mixed design study in which ninety-four, Turkish elementary-school students participated in two separate creativity tasks within one of four, randomly assigned conditions: intrinsic motivation, expected evaluation, expected individual reward, and expected group reward. Two- way ANOVA was used to search for group difference as well as sex difference in each of the creativity tasks. In the task that was more closely associated with play (the collage making), the intrinsic motivation and expected evaluation conditions produced the highest levels of creativity and the condition difference was driven by the female participants while male participant scores remained relatively flat across all conditions. In the task that was more closely associated with work (storytelling), the expected evaluation and expected group reward conditions produced the highest levels of creativity, while both males and females drove the difference between groups with significantly higher scores among females. These results show clear dissimilarity between responses of Turkish and U.S. populations and imply that much of what has previously been considered universal in the study of motivation, behavior, and creativity, may be culture-specific.