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Pitting female colleagues against each other kills creativity, according to a new study.

While previous studies shows that adding women to groups boosts cooperation and creativity, new research reveals that this is only true when women work on teams that aren't competing against each other. Enhanced creativity and cooperation disappears when women are forced to compete with one another.

"Intergroup competition is a double-edged sword that ultimately provides an advantage to groups and units composed predominantly or exclusively of men, while hurting the creativity of groups composed of women," lead researcher Markus Baer, PhD, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Olin Business School, said in a news release.

While competition boosts creativity among men, the latest study reveals that women perform better in less competitive environments.

"Women contributed less and less to the team's creative output when the competition between teams became cutthroat, and this fall-off was most pronounced in teams composed entirely of women," Baer said.

"If teams work side by side, women tend to perform better and even outperform men - they're more creative," Baer said. "As soon as you add the element of competition though, the picture changes. Men under those circumstances gel together. They become more interdependent and more collaborative, and women just do the opposite."

"So, what is true for non-competitive circumstances, flips when it gets competitive," he said.

"Given that women represent a growing portion of the workforce, using competition as a means to enhance the creativity of groups, regardless of how they are composed, implies that the creative potential available to businesses is seldom fully realized," researchers wrote in the study,

"It's not that women stink at competing, it's that the way society views women and the way we view competition, gender specific, has an impact and that impact is observable in the lab as well as in the field," Baer concluded. "It changes behaviors and outcomes."

The study, titled "Intergroup Competition as a Double-Edged Sword: How Sex Composition Regulates the Effects of Competition on Group Creativity," is published in the journal Organization Science.