CREATIVITY AND WORK

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CREATIVITY AND WORK
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Amabile's theory of creativity

• Domain-relevant skills
• Creativity-relevant mental processes
• Task motivation

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Domain-relevant skills

• The more skills the better, it appears, perhaps
  because it gives more choices. The ability to
  imagine situations and play them out mentally is
  important in many cases.

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Creativity-relevant processes

• Breaking perceptual set. That is, being able to
  change the way you look at or perceive a
  situation.
• Breaking cognitive set. That is, being able to
  change the way you analyze a situation.
• Understanding complexities. For example,
  something may be not all good or all bad, but
  mixed.
• Keeping response options open as long as possible
• Perceiving creatively, or at least perceiving
  things differently from the way most people see
  them

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More processes

• Suspending judgment. Amabile quotes the
  nineteenth-century German poet Schiller, "In the
  case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the
  intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the
  gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only
  then does it review and inspect the multitude.
• Using "wide" categories. For example, being able
  to include a lot of different experiences under
  the heading of "education.
• Remembering accurately.
• Breaking out of performance "scripts."

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Knowledge of heuristics (trial-and-error
techniques)

• When all else fails, try something
  counterintuitive.
• Make the familiar strange
• Generate hypotheses by analyzing case studies
• Use analogies
• Account for exceptions (i.e. don't ignore them)
• Investigate paradoxical incidents
• Play with ideas
• Use "mental gymnastics"

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Creativity relevant processes

• Adopting a work style conducive to creativity
  (collected from various researchers)
• o Ability to concentrate efforts for long
  periods
• o Use "productive forgetting" when warranted
• o Persistence in the face of difficulty
• o High energy level, willingness to work hard,
  
• overall high level of productivity
• o High degree of self-discipline in matters
• regarding work
• o An ability to delay gratification

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More

• o Perseverance in the face of frustration
• o Independence of judgment
• o A tolerance for ambiguity
• o A high degree of autonomy
• o An absence of sex-role stereotyping
• o An internal locus of control
• o A willingness to take risks although according
  
• to Drucker, not financial risks -- these
  are not stupid
• people!
• o A high level of self-initiated, task-oriented
  striving for
• excellence

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Task motivation

• Task motivation is the centerpiece, the most
  important component, in Amabile's three-component
  theory. Intrinsic or internal motivation, as
  opposed to extrinsic motivation that comes from
  outside sources, is necessary to reach the
  highest level of creativity.

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• Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA.
• In today's knowledge economy, creativity is more
  important than ever. But many companies
  unwittingly employ managerial practices that kill
  it. How? By crushing their employees' intrinsic
  motivation--the strong internal desire to do
  something based on interests and passions.
  Managers don't kill creativity on purpose. Yet in
  the pursuit of productivity, efficiency, and
  control--all worthy business imperatives--they
  undermine creativity. It doesn't have to be that
  way, says Teresa Amabile. Business imperatives
  can comfortably coexist with creativity. But
  managers will have to change their thinking
  first.

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• Specifically, managers will need to understand
  that creativity has three parts expertise, the
  ability to think flexibly and imaginatively, and
  motivation. Managers can influence the first two,
  but doing so is costly and slow. It would be far
  more effective to increase employees' intrinsic
  motivation. To that end, managers have five
  levers to pull the amount of challenge they give
  employees, the degree of freedom they grant
  around process, the way they design work groups,
  the level of encouragement they give, and the
  nature of organizational support.

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• Take challenge as an example. Intrinsic
  motivation is high when employees feel challenged
  but not overwhelmed by their work. The task for
  managers, therefore, becomes matching people to
  the right assignments. Consider also freedom.
  Intrinsic motivation--and thus creativity--soars
  when managers let people decide how to achieve
  goals, not what goals to achieve. Managers can
  make a difference when it comes to employee
  creativity. The result can be truly innovative
  companies in which creativity doesn't just
  survive but actually thrives.

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Work Preference Inventory

• Department of Psychology, Brandeis University,
  Waltham, Massachusetts 02254.
• The Work Preference Inventory (WPI) is designed
  to assess individual differences in intrinsic and
  extrinsic motivational orientations. Both the
  college student and the working adult versions
  aim to capture the major elements of intrinsic
  motivation (self-determination, competence, task
  involvement, curiosity, enjoyment, and interest)
  and extrinsic motivation (concerns with
  competition, evaluation, recognition, money or
  other tangible incentives, and constraint by
  others). The instrument is scored on two primary
  scales, each subdivided into 2 secondary scales.
  The WPI has meaningful factor structures,
  adequate internal consistency, good short-term
  test-retest reliability, and good longer term
  stability. Moreover, WPI scores are related in
  meaningful ways to other questionnaire and
  behavioral measures of motivation, as well as
  personality characteristics, attitudes, and
  behaviors.