While teams can draw upon diverse perspectives of their members, the presence of contrasting views entail the risk that creative ideas are rejected during collaboration, without being considered for closer evaluation. Therein, organizations frequently employ rewards with the intention to motivating members and cultivating creativity in the team. Drawing on the Motivated Information Processing in Groups Model (MIP-G) we assess how varying reward structures influence the dissemination and integration of information during the collective idea generation process. In line with the MIP - G, we first posit that individual rewards foster proself motivation which in turn increases idea rejection, whereas team rewards emphasize prosocial motivation which decreases idea rejection. Further we postulate that mixed rewards combine proself and prosocial motivation. which is why we presume that these leads to greater idea rejection as compared to team rewards, but less rejection as compared to individual rewards. Based on an experimental study with 81 teams involving 293 participants, we demonstrate that individual rewards increase idea rejection. Contrary to our expectations, however, team rewards also significantly heighten idea rejection, whereas mixed rewards tend to reduce it. Thus, our research offers a new perspective on the motivated information processing in teams. Herein, it highlights that the combination of both proself, and prosocial motives is beneficial for the idea generation process in teams, whereas their separate consideration increases the tendency of team members to reject each other’s ideas.
