Creativity
Beth A. Hennessey1 and Teresa M. Amabile2
2010
October 19, 2009
Key words
innovation, intrinsic motivation, divergent thinking
page count: 30 pages
introduction 570
review of the literature:
creativity as seen from different levels of analysis 572
definition and measurement 572
neurological/biological basis 573
affect, cognition, and training 574
individual differences/personality 577
groups and teams 578
the social psychology of creativity 581
social environment organizations 582
social environment: schools 585
social environment: culture 587
conclusion: taking a systems perspective 589
Beth A. Hennessey, Teresa M. Amabile, ’Creativity’, October 19, 2009, 2010
(Beth A. Hennessey and Teresa M. Amabile, Creativity, October 19, 2009, 2010 )
p.570
Creativity: the generation of products or ideas that are both novel and appropriate
p.571
Systems approach
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Figure 1
the increasingly large concentric circles in this simplified schematic represent the major levels at which creativity forces operate.
p.573
In the contemporary of creative products, be they poems, paintings, scientific theories, or technological breakthroughs, rests largely on a consensual assessment process.
p.573
In recent years, consensual assessment methodologies have also been extended to far more “messy” real-world classroom and workplace environments, including cross-cultural contexts (e.g., Amabile & Mueller 2008, Lee et al. 2005).
p.573
Researchers have employed the Torrance Tests for Creative Thinking (TTCT; Torrance 1966/1974)
p.573
Baer (2008) concluded that creativity is best conceptualized as domain specific and argued that this domain specificity explains why divergent-thinking tests have not met with more success; research by Mumford and colleagues (1998, 2008) also questioned the validity of divergent-thinking tests.
p.574
Intrinsic motivation: the drive to engage in a task because it is interesting, enjoyable, or positively challenging
Divergent thinking: spontaneous, free-flowing thinking with the goal of generating many different ideas in a short period
p.575
Kray and colleagues (2006) explored what they termed a “relational processing style” elicited by counterfactual mind-sets. More specifically, they asked study participants to compare reality to what might have been and in so doing encouraged them to consider relationships and associations among stimuli. They found that, although such mind-sets can be detrimental to novel idea generation, they can improve performance on creative association tasks. Miller (2007) found a significant relation between field independence and creativity on collage-making task.
p.575
A large body of research has pointed to the importance of conceptual combination in creative thought.
pp.575-576
Ward (2001) argued for a “convergent approach” to the study of conceptual combination──incorporating both anecdotal accounts and laboratory investigations of the creative process.
p.576
Treffinger & Selby (2004) presented a rubric intended to characterize individual differences in problem-solving style involving Orientation to Change, Manner of Processing, and Ways of Deciding. And Scott et al. (2005) described an elegant experiment designed to compare and contrast an analogical approach to generating combinations (involving feature search and mapping) with a case-based approach (integrating and elaborating on event models).
p.576
Perhaps Mumford & Antes (2007) best summarized the state of the field when they called for caution to be applied in any attempt to account for creative achievement based on a single model of the kind of knowledge or cognitive processes involved.
p.579
He pointed out that creatively solvable problems vary considerably in their complexity, requisite knowledge base, and the amounts of divergent and convergent thinking that are needed. This model emphasized the fact that a complete creative problem-solving process entails both considerable convergent and divergent thought in continuing alternation, and it predicted that individuals, teams, and entire organizations with different preferences and abilities, knowledge, and work arrangements would be good matches for some problems and poor matches for others. Brophy (2006) later found empirical support for this model.
p.579
Convergent thinking: more diciplined thinking, focused on narrowing possibilities to a workable solution
p.579
Paulus & Yang (2000) discovered two important factors that enabled idea sharing in groups to become more productive: (a) the extent to which group members carefully processed the ideas exchanged in the group (attention) and (b) the opportunity for group members to reflect on the ideas after the exchange process (incubation).
p.579
SIAM model (Search for Ideas in Associative Memory)
p.579
This model assumes that idea generation is a repeated search for ideas in associative memory, which proceeds in two stages (knowledge activation and idea production) is controlled through negative feedback loops and cognitive failures (trials in which no idea is generated).
p.580
Hargadon & Bechky (2006)
six professional service firms
identify behaviors leading to “moments of collective creativity”.
They identified four sets of interrelated behavior patterns that moved teams beyond individuals' insights: (a) help seeking, (b) help giving, (c) reflective reframing, and (d) reinforcing.
p.580
Mannix & Neale (2005) conducted a review of 50 years of research and concluded that the preponderance of evidence yields a pessimistic view: Group diversity creates social divisions, with negative performance consequences. The authors suggest that more positive effects, such as creativity, can arise from underlying differences such as functional background, education, or personality──but only when group process is managed carefully.
p.587
Both quantitative and qualitative data showed that creative methods developed in United Kingdom were highly effective in encouraging creativity and related constructs, including intrinsic motivation, among Chinese university students.
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