Environmental Stimulants to Creativity - Research Results - Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School

Friday, December 10, 2010 at 07:07PM
Ralph Kerle in Creativity, Environment, Teresa Amabile, creativity, organization

 In Chapter 8 of Creativity in Context, Teresa Amabile presents her research on characteristics work environments that foster creativity. The research method was to ask groups of employees (research scientists, bank employees and railroad employees) to describe two critical work incidents, one involving high creativity and the other involving low creativity. The incidents did not necessarily feature the person responding; that is, they could describe incidents not involving themselves. The surprising result was that the descriptions did not involve the characteristics of the creative or non-creative person, but instead focused on the general work environment. Here are the most important characteristics listed by Amabile, in rank order (most important first) for the research scientists. (Amabile writes that the members of the list were the same for bank and railroad employees, although the order was sometimes different.)

Environmental Stimulants to Creativity

1. Freedom in deciding what to do or how to accomplish the task
2. A good manager, enthusiastic, good communications skills, protects team from distractions and interference, matches tasks to skills and interests, sets a clear direction without micromanaging
3. Access to necessary resources - facilities, equipment, information, funds, people
4. Encouragement, enthusiasm for new ideas, atmosphere free of threatening evaluation
5. Organizational characteristics such as a formal mechanism for considering new ideas, climate marked by cooperation and collaboration across levels and divisions, atmosphere where innovation is prized and failure is not fatal
6. Recognition for creative work in the form of feedback, recognition and reward
7. Time to think creatively, explore different characteristics
8. Challenge, a sense of having interesting  and important work to do, internalized by employees as personal challenges
9. Pressure arising from competition with other units, or a desire to do something important

There is also a list of environmental obstacles to creativity, although these are mostly the opposites of the stimulants, with a slightly different order For example, the organizational characteristics are #5 for stimulants but #1 for obstacles. Intriguing, but I don't know what to make of the difference in order.

These nine characteristics agree well, I think, with the six characteristics in Corporate Creativity.

On the basis of this list, Amabile and coworkers developed a questionnaire for assessing workplace creativity called KEYS. Those who are interested can find references on Pg 232 of Creativity in Context.

Amabile's Chapter 8 also has a summary of general social influences of creativity, by one of the best-known creativity researchers, Dean Keith Simonton. Simonton studied famous or eminent creative artists from previous ages. (Fame and eminence, as Amabile notes, may not be the best indicators of creativity, but may be sufficient for Simonton's study.) He carried out exhaustive analyses of each subject's activity, for example rating the unusualness of a composer's themes or motifs by cataloging each pair of successive notes, and then statistically finding out how often that pair was used for all of the composers. Similarly, for each creator that he studied, the output for each five-year period of the creator's life was calculated. Simonton did several such studies, for example ten classical composers, 127 generations of European creators, 12,761 important discoveries, 301 people rated as geniuses in a sample produced by Cox, etc. Many of these samples were the subject of individual studies by Simonton. In his own 1978 summary of this work, Simonton listed his main conclusions. These conclusions are summarized here, on the basis of Amabile's presentations:

• Social reinforcements such as honors, prizes and awards have no effect on creativity.
• Having contemporary creative competitors decreases the number of themes a composer produces.
• Discursive creativity (science, philosophy, literature and music) increases with the availability of more role models from the previous two generations, but decreases with the number of contemporary role models.
• The father's professional status has no effect on the fame of a creative genius
• Creativity in general increases with the amount of political fragmentation in the immediate past
• Political instability and was can have negative effects on creativity, but this will be positive if the disturbances are far away
• Poetry is produced at a younger age than prose
• The number of themes produced by a composer in each five year period increases with age, but then decreases after a certain point, although not to the lower levels of the younger years (inverted backwards J function)
• Famousness or eminence increases with increasing age, then decreases all the way after a certain period (inverted U function)
• Eminence or famousness for creators increases with the amount of formal education, then peaks and decreases after a certain point (inverted U function)
• The amount of versatility shown by a creator increases with the amount of formal education, with no decreases seen.
• Later creativity increases with the amount of childhood creativity (preciousness) shown
• The number of themes produced by a composer decreases in the presence of physical illness
• Biographical stress, such as the death of a spouse or close relative, does not affect the number of works produced by a composer, but does increase the originality of musical themes.

Article originally appeared on The Creative Leadership Forum - Collaborate - Create - Commercialise & Transformational Change (http://thecreativeleadershipforum.com/).