Creativity Research

An Inter-Disciplinary and Multi-Disciplinary Research Handbook

Eric Shiu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138206137
• eBook ISBN: 9781136249587
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Compared to its 'cousin' innovation, academic research on creativity has been less well covered in journals and books. This is despite the fact that creativity has a profound role in many different subject disciplines.

This book is a unique collection of some of the latest research from a range of leading creativity researchers. Providing a clear understanding of the main concepts, this book:

• Introduces creativity from an inter-disciplinary perspective
• Discusses the environmental determinants of creativity development
• Explores creativity research in the differing disciplines of business, music and education

Creativity Research will be of interest and importance to researchers across a variety of subject disciplines, as well as students and practitioners of creativity, innovation and organizational behaviour, amongst others.

Part I

Holistic understanding of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary creativity

1 Looking at creativity through a business–psychology–education (BPE) lens

The challenge and benefits of listening to each other

Roni Reiter-Palmon, Ronald A. Beghetto and James C. Kaufman

Lewis Morris: Mr. President, have you ever been present at a meeting of the New York legislature? [He shakes his head “No”] They speak very fast and very loud, and nobody listens to anybody else, with the result that nothing ever gets done.

1776 (Stone & Edwards, 1976)

Creativity is a universal concept that crosses over into many academic fields. Archeologists might study the origins and evolution of creative behavior (Mithen, 1996), whereas a neurologist may emphasize creativity produced by people with degenerative brain disease (Schott, 2012). Art historians, nursing professors, and economists all have different approaches to thinking about creativity. However, we would argue that most of the conceptual, definitional work has been conducted in the broad arenas of psychology, education, and business. Despite such potential synergy, researchers can sometimes resemble the (fictional) New York legislature described above. These three fields have their own journals and conferences, and seminal work from one arena may not even be widely known in another. There is a perpetual risk of reinventing the wheel (and engine, batteries, and breaks) without increased communication. One of the goals of this chapter is to discuss how theory and research from business, psychology, and education can complement and inform the others.

We feel there is great potential in viewing creativity through a more integrated, business–psychology–education (BPE) lens. Educators can, for instance, gain new insights into how to better address the longstanding challenge of incorporating creativity into their classroom (Beghetto, 2010; Guilford, 1950; Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004) by understanding how psychology and business have conceptualized and measured creativity. Psychologists who study creativity will, for example, be in a better position to bridge the “idiographic–nomathetic divide” (Grice, Jackson, & McDaniel, 2006) by considering the kinds of methods and measures that are needed to simultaneously understand individual and organizational creativity in educational and business settings. Business leaders and managers can also learn strategies and insights from education and psychology that might help them cultivate the kind of work environment necessary for catalyzing and sustaining the motivation necessary for employee creativity and organizational innovation (Puccio & Cabra, 2010).

Realizing this cross-disciplinary potential will, however, require a realistic understanding of several core issues and tensions that have maintained the trifurcation among these areas. We refer to cross-disciplinary in this context as the evaluation and study of creativity from multiple perspectives and multiple disciplines. In this case, we have opted to evaluate creativity from the perspective of business, education, and psychology. In the following section, we highlight one of those issues – what we call the consequence question – and discuss how this issue not only presents a challenge for creativity researchers, but can also serve as an opportunity for bringing together the three strands of BPE-oriented creativity research.

The consequence question

The consequence question of creativity pertains to the sub-questions of: Why pursue creativity in the first place? What is the outcome of creativity in business, psychology, and education? Is creativity the outcome (an end in itself) or does creativity lead to some other more fundamental or ultimate end? These questions, although not always explicitly stated, loom large with respect to whether and how creativity is pursued and developed in educational and business settings. Moreover, the ways in which these questions are addressed sometimes differ and sometimes overlap in how business, educational, and psychological researchers approach creativity.

Prior to exploring some more concrete examples of the similarities and differences in the experience and research on creativity across BPE, we feel it is first important to briefly explore the philosophical and historical basis of this question. Doing so will help clarify important differences amongst the three fields and also help identify new areas of possible convergence.

The philosophical basis of the consequence question has its roots in Aristotelian philosophy. Aristotle’s basic teleological framework explores the question of: When might something be considered an end in itself? Happiness or, more specifically, eudaimonia is the example that Aristotle offers as meeting the criteria of such a complete or ultimate end (Shields, 2012). This is because happiness, according to Aristotle, can be pursued for its own sake; serves as the reason why we pursue other things; and is, thereby, self-sufficient, complete, and fulfilling in itself (Shields, 2012).

With respect to the consequence question in creativity, such a philosophical exploration can help researchers identify the rationale provided for the pursuit of creativity in BPE. Specifically, is creativity conceptualized as an end itself (having intrinsic value) or as a means to some other end (having instrumental value)? The response to this question varies within and amongst BPE.

In psychology, for instance, creativity has been variously described as an end in itself (Cropley, 1990; Osborne, 2003) and as an instrumental means to other ends, such as health and happiness (see Richards, 2007). We would argue, however, that research psychologists have typically conceptualized creativity as an end result (the consequence, product, outcome, dependent variable). Conversely, in business, creativity is typically characterized as having more instrumental value – a means to some other end (e.g., linked to increased revenue, productivity, innovation, and so on). Puccio and Cabra (2010), for example, note that leaders who use knowledge and strategies associated with promoting creativity “stand a greater chance in bringing about organizational creativity that will ultimately lead to higher levels of both internal and external innovation” (p. 166, emphasis added). Others have argued that creativity in business is critical for organizational survival and organizational success (George, 2007; Mumford & Hunter, 2005).

Some creativity researchers even view creativity as simultaneously playing an instrumental and consequential role. Piirto (2004), for instance, has asserted that the lived experience is a creative process and the creative life is the product. However, in most cases, emphasis is placed either on creative process (means to another end) or product (end in itself).

Creativity, in education, has arguably held the most tenuous position. Although creativity is sometimes described in education as a worthwhile end in itself (see Beghetto & Kaufman, 2010), education (similar to business) typically holds outcomes other than creativity (i.e. learning, skill development, development of academic competence) as being more foundational to the core mission of formal education. Unfortunately, unlike business, where the link is clearer between creativity and valued organizational outcomes (i.e. product development, successful marketing and advertising campaigns, increased market share), researchers have yet to establish a theoretical and empirically warranted link between creativity and learning (see Beghetto & Kaufman, 2009). Consequently, the role of creativity in education still occupies a murkier position.

An example may help illustrate. Consider a parent selecting a school for their kindergartner. Let us imagine the decision comes down to two schools. School one is a somewhat traditional kindergarten and focuses on developing students’ confidence and readiness for first grade – noting, in particular, a ten-year track record of having approximately 90 percent of their students exiting kindergarten being able to read at a first grade level and 85 percent of their students exiting kindergarten being able to accurately compute single-digit addition and subtraction problems.

The other school focuses on “cultivating the creative spirit of children” – asserting that the school’s number one goal is to help students identify and develop their unique creative talents. Confronted with this choice, and based on only this level of information, admittedly even we, as creativity researchers and advocates of incorporating creativity in schools, would feel less comfortable about sending our child to school two.

This scenario gets at the taproot of the consequence question. Whereas it is rather clear to almost anyone what is meant by “readiness” in the form of having students be able to read and perform basic addition and subtraction, it is not at all clear what is meant by “cultivating the creative spirit of children” or “helping students identify and develop their unique creative talents.” Not only is it often unclear what exactly is meant by “creativity” or how it is measured, but even more problematically: Why it is important to focus on it in the first place?

Although advocates of creativity may believe that creativity is an important outcome in its own right, educators – given an already overwhelming number of educational goals and outcomes – must be able to justify to themselves, parents, administrators, and even students why they are spending precious curricular time on something that is often ill-defined, not well understood, difficult to measure, and thereby difficult to provide a compelling rationale for pursuing as an educational goal. This ambiguity in what is meant by creativity speaks to a longstanding historical issue in the broader field of creativity studies.

In this chapter, we seek to provide additional clarity by providing a comparison of important aspects related to creativity in a cross-disciplinary fashion, specifically focusing on creativity in business, psychology, and education. Specifically, we compare these disciplines across four major areas of study in the larger domain of creativity. The major areas of study include a) the definition of creativity, b) the measurement of creativity, c) the outcomes of creativity, and d) environments that support creativity. We highlight how each discipline addresses core issues in these areas of study and discuss what can be learned by understanding disciplinary similarities and differences.

Definitions of creativity across BPE

Conceptual fuzziness (both real and perceived) presents a challenge to researchers interested not only in understanding what is meant by creativity, but also in recognizing potential links and opportunities across creativity studies in BPE. Plucker et al. (2004), for instance, analyzed 90 papers in business, education, psychology, and creativity journals. They found that only 38 percent explicitly defined creativity. When creativity was defined, it was considered to have two key components: uniqueness (originality, newness, novelty) and usefulness (meaningfulness, fit, task appropriateness).

Plucker et al. (2004) proposed the following definition based on this content analysis: “Creativity is the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context” (p. 90). Several scholars have suggested possible third components; Simonton (2012, in press), for example, expands on the criteria developed by the US Patent Office and proposes that something creative should also be surprising. However, at present the field of creativity studies seems to be in general consensus that creativity involves the combination of originality and task appropriateness (Amabile, 1996; Kaufman, 2009; Sternberg & Lubart, 1996) as defined within a particular context (Plucker et al., 2004).

Having an agreed-upon definition provides guidance not only for how creativity might be understood, measured, and supported in applied settings like business and education, but also for comparing how research-based insights across business, education, and psychology might be integrated. However, important (and sometimes nuanced) variations in how creativity is defined, measured, and cultivated remain.

Defining creativity in education

The generally agreed-upon definitional attributes of creativity – requiring a combination of originality and task appropriateness as defined in a particular context – provide a basis from which educators (and creativity researchers working in educational settings) can recognize forms of creative expression that might otherwise go unnoticed. For instance, using these definitional criteria, a sixth grader’s school science project could be considered creative in the context of a school science fair (even though it might be considered quite pedestrian to professional scientists or the larger scientific community). Specifically, in order for the student’s science fair project to be considered creative, it must be both original and appropriate for the task at hand. An interpretive dance about photosynthesis – no matter how original – would be inappropriate to the task at hand. In order for the science project to be creative, it would need to be both unique and relevant to the constraints of the school science fair.

In addition to the combination of originality and task appropriateness, many definitions of creativity emphasize – whether explicitly or implicitly – that creativity be embodied in some perceptible product or artifact. This emphasis on creative products, what has been called “product bias” (Runco, 2007), can result in overlooking creative potential and more subjective experiences of crea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Holistic understanding of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary creativity
• Part II Environmental determinants of creativity
• Part III Creativity research in Organizations
• Part IV Creativity research in music
• Part V Creativity research in education
• Index