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

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.)

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Evaluation, Rewards, Competition and Contraints -- Their Effects on Creativity - Teresa Amabile

Teresa Amabile is a well-known creativity researcher, who has focussed on the effects on creativity produced by evaluation, rewards, competition and constraints. I find it very interesting that Dr. Amabile is a professor of business administration (and at Harvard University). Some material from her book, Creativity in Context (1996, Westview Press) is summarized below. According to Amabiles experimental results, evaluation (as, say, good or bad) and rewards have very similar results on creativity. The results depend upon the nature of the task -- is it * Heuristic, where many possibilities must be explored OR * Algorithmic, where the task is primarily a linear series of steps, where the order is clear.

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