The overall purpose of this measure is to create an alternative method of identifying creative individuals in the workplace.
The evolving business landscape has left organizations searching
for ways to sustain a competitive advantage (Snow & Snell, 1993).
One such method may be through the enhancement of creative performance
in the workplace (Amabile, 1998).
Several researchers (e.g. Amabile 1996; George & Zhou, 2001; Oldham &
Cummings, 1996) have suggested that creative performance is maximized
under (a) appropriate contextual conditions such as supportive
supervision and opportunity to perform complex tasks, as well as (b)
when employee creative ability is high.
Thus, the identification of employees with creative ability becomes one essential element of increasing innovation in the workplace.
Current Creativity Measures
Current creativity measures have shown promising results in predicting creative performance. However, they are lacking in one or more ways; they:
Require too much time to administer and score
Are subjectively scored
Are not standardized to allow for the development of norms
Are not organizationally based
Therefore, the purpose of the current project was to explore an alternative method of identifying creative individuals.
Method
Participants
376 participants (total) were used in the study. The large majority of participants were students from differing classes in the psychology department in a medium-sized, Southern university.
Scale Development
Scale development consisted of four main phases:
1. Item stem and response generation 40 open-ended stems were written. 60 participants provided written responses to the item stems.
2. Identification of creative and non-creative individuals Using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking and Openness to Experience, creative and non-creative individuals were selected.
3. Rating Responses Creative and non-creative individuals rated the responses according to how similar were to items they would have generated themselves.
4. Selecting Items Items that differentiated creative and non-creative individuals were selected for the final version of the measure. Each selected item-stem contained two responses: a creative response and a non-creative response, or a forced-choice item.
Discussion
The findings of the study are encouraging in that the new scale reveals some discriminant and convergent validity with known creativity measures and other personality traits. Moreover, the brevity of the new scale, as well as the ease of scoring, make further investigation of this, and other similar scales, worth the research effort.
These preliminary results also suggest that a forced-choice measure of creativity may be possible, and worth further exploration.
Finally, the results of the study suggest that similar scaling techniques such as the sue of bio-data could provide additional methods of identifying creative individuals in the workplace.
Limitations: A lack of creativity criterion makes it unclear as to whether the new scale will add to the prediction of creative performance in the workplace. Further, the low internal consistency and poor factor structure make the use of the new scale at this stage somewhat suspect. Finally, the methodology used to develop the new scale deviated from standard scale development procedures, and is therefore noted as a limitation.
Future Research: Further data collection using comprehensive creativity criteria will shed light onto the true utility of the new scale. Moreover, the investigation of the relationship between creative ability/performance and demographic data are important areas for future research. Finally, the new scale has been converted into a computerized format, and the exploration of such testing techniques will serve as an important area for future research.
