Understanding and Measuring Creative Thinking in Leaders

194 THE 71F ADVANTAGEskewed (-.41 versus .11), but also considerably less leptokurtic (-.15versus .42), meaning that the preponderance of MM openness scoresare far more positively leaning than those for the IPIP–NEO, as well ashaving a flatter or wider distribution. These results raise the questionwhether the two scales are measuring the same phenomena with respectto our population, at least in terms of how they differentially distributeour subjects.It is instructive to compare our sample’s openness means on thetwo instruments to those from Sauciers’s (1994) MM sample of 1,125community residents of Eugene-Springfield, Oregon, and Johnson’s(2006) IPIP–NEO sample of 20,993 Web users. For the mini-markers,Saucier reports an openness scale mean of 6.6, or nearly the same asours (6.4). Johnson, however, finds an openness mean that is decidedlyhigher than ours (3.6 versus 3.1). This comparison alone, however, doesnot make clear whether the differences are due to the instruments themselves,or rather the variable nature of the sample populations.The descriptive statistics for the individual openness MM itemsand IPIP–NEO facets are shown in table 8–10. These statistics help clarifythe sources of variability on the respective measures. While thereare statistically significant mean differences among the MM items—forexample, between “intellectual” and “philosophical” (t = 7.8, p < .05)—differences are more pronounced on the IPIP–NEO. To cite two examples,means on both O1–Imagination and especially O6–Liberalism arebelow the scale midpoint (neutral) and are significantly lower than theO5–Intellect mean (t = 11.1, p < .05 and t = 21.0, p < .05, respectively).(Statistics for the individual IPIP–NEO items are found in appendix B.)Multivariate AnalysisA multivariate regression analysis was conducted to help answerthe critical question of how well the MM openness scale represents therelevant facets on the IPIP–NEO openness scale. Standardized betas arepresented to show the relative predictive power of each IPIP–NEO facetvis-à-vis MM scale scores. The results are presented in table 8–11.The conclusion from the descriptive analyses that the IPIP–NEOopenness scale might well be measuring at least somewhat differentphenomena than the MM openness scale is considerably reinforcedby these results. The MM openness scale scores are most clearly predictedby O5–Intellect with an extremely strong standardized beta orbeta weight of .62. There is only one other definitely significant effect foran associated IPIP–NEO facet, O4–Adventurousness, though its relative