Creativity Theory - TRaining MAterial in Creativity and InnovaTion ...

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28 A. ESSENTIALS derstand creativity in a social context necessitates an exploration of creative processes, creative products, creative persons and creative situations. A useful theory of organizational creativity must provide a framework of sufficient complexity and richness to integrate these four creative components. 6. Characteristics of Creativity People differ in their level of creativity as well as in the manner in which they express their creativity. Micheal Kirton [11] suggests that there are two types of creative persons: Adaptors, whose preference is to work within the system to improve things, and Innovators who ignore or challenge the system and come up with more radical proposals for change. Adaptors are conforming, efficient and like to deal with ideas a few at a time, while Innovators are non-conforming, inefficient, and like to propagate ideas. The Adaptor’s motive is towards doing things better, whereas the Innovator’s is towards doing things differently. Adaptors Innovators Prefer to do things better; Seek professions that encourage stability and order such as accountability and production; Formulate ideas without changing the initial data of the problem very much. Prefer to do things differently; Are found in departments such as marketing which demand interaction with changing environments (who deal with uncertainty); Would rather produce ideas by introducing new elements in the context of a problem and also by changing the relationship between the elements of a problem. Table 01: Differences between Adaptors and Innovators (Source of table: http://www.brainstorming.co.uk/contents.html) Despite this assumption we have to underline the main characteristics of creativity: Motivation is the measure of the emotional investment it takes for people to break natural inertia and to move from their current circumstances toward what they want. The distance between circumstances and desire, creates emotional pressure that activates somebody to make something new. This activating desire is the dynamics that starts a person on the creative process. In other words, to begin a creative process, every individual and every company needs motivation. Once you are motivated, your curiosity follows and along with it comes fear. Curiosity consists of a search for possibly useful information and transforms the unknown from something potentially dangerous into something manageable, interesting and beneficial. However, such an unknown is often frightening. In moments of fear, curiosity becomes hard to sustain and so, some individuals, if sufficiently frightened, lose most of their capacity for creative curiosity. Furthermore, if faced with new potentially risky tasks they tend to avoid beginning them. The solution could lie in an individual having such strong intrinsic belief and commitment to the work that any possible discouragement is negated. Breaking and making connections is where most of the work of creativity gets done. Destruction means destruction of rigid sets of assumptions about what can and can not be done in a particular situation. In relation to connections, most day-to-day creativity occurs when people have over time, gained large amounts of interconnected knowledge in select areas. But if it is true that people are more creatively prolific in their particular discipline, it is also true that this could often be a hindrance to discovery. Looking at patterns of information from different disciplines helps break up current lines of thinking and old assumptions. It is a useful way to start new connections.
6. Characteristics of Creativity Evaluation: sooner or later one has to make decisions, but new ideas do not come full blown nor are they ready to be accepted or rejected. They need to be explored, modified and tailored before anyone can make a proper decision about their worth. Evaluation ends with rejection or acceptance of the idea and natural closure allows the active, inquisitive, creative mind to focus on other challenges. As Gerhard Fischer argues, we have to underline the social nature of creativity [12]. The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated, and although creative individuals are often thought of as working in isolation, much of our intelligence and creativity results from interaction and collaboration with other individuals. Creativity does not happen inside people’s minds, but in the interaction between a person’s thought and a socio-cultural context. However, this does not mean that individual creativity should be considered as irrelevant. Instead, creativity must have an element of “and” rather than a “versus” when it comes to the relationship between individual and social creativity. It is also interesting to mention Guilford’s view of creativity [13]. For him, creativity is a pattern of traits that are characteristic of creative persons. Such traits or abilities include the following: • Sensitivity to problems. Creative people see problems where others do not. This ability is related to curiosity • Fluency. Those people who produce large numbers of ideas are more likely to have significant ideas • Novel ideas. Creative people have unusual but appropriate ideas • Synthesizing and analyzing abilities. Creative thinking requires the organizing of ideas into larger, more inclusive patterns and symbolic structures must often be broken down before new ones can be built • Complexity. Possibly related to synthesizing, complexity refers to the number of interrelated ideas an individual can manipulate at once • Evaluation. At some point, the value of new ideas must be determined. It is also interesting to mention 3 important ingredients [14] about creativity suggested by Gilbert Tan which include foundation, competencies and support. Foundation refers to belief systems. Both employees and managers must have positive belief systems. Employees must think positively of themselves and believe that they can be creative and managers (or supervisors) must have positive beliefs regarding their subordinates. Competencies suggest that an individual needs to be competent in order to be creative. Employees need to have a mix of creativity, technical and human relations skills in order to exercise creativity effectively in organizations and leaders should be role models to their employees. Support is important because besides competencies, employees need support from the organization in order to be creative. Despite this, creativity theory suggests that in a workplace, creativity is essential to organizational innovation, and when a working environment facilitates idea generation, knowledge sharing and creative problem solving, individuals in that environment are more likely to generate creative ideas that involve unique concepts or new applications of existing concepts. In this way, creative ideas can be used for problem resolution, process improvements and the development of new services and/or products. 29 CREATIVITY THEORY
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