Where does creativity collide?

Here creativity is a trait of the individual mind: a cognitive ability to produce many, varied, and original ideas from a single starting point. Guilford's 1950 presidential address Creativity to the American Psychological Association put the topic on the research agenda and located it in what he later called divergent production, the capacity to branch outward toward multiple answers rather than converge on the one correct answer that most tests reward. In this tradition the thing measured lives inside a person and is scored from the ideas they generate: how many (fluency), how many kinds (flexibility), and how unusual (originality). The referent is a capacity of the thinker, not the worth of any finished work, not a level of eminence, and not a property of a whole organisation.[1]

Unit

One person's idea-generating ability, scored from their responses

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Divergent-thinking tasks such as alternate uses, scored for fluency, flexibility, and originality; later the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking

Here creativity is a quality of a product or response, not a quality of the person who made it. Amabile's 1983 The social psychology of creativity: A componential conceptualization defined a creative response as one that is both novel and appropriate to the task, and argued that only informed observers, agreeing among themselves, can reliably decide whether a given piece clears that bar. The construct is therefore operationalised by consensus: give the same brief to many people and have experts rate each result. Runco and Jaeger's 2012 review calls novelty paired with usefulness the standard definition of the field. The referent is the judged worth of an outcome, which can come apart from a person's raw idea-generating ability, from any tally of lifetime eminence, and from the setting that produced it.[2][3]

Unit

One product or response, rated for novelty and appropriateness

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The Consensual Assessment Technique: independent expert judges rate products made to a common brief, and their agreement defines the score

Here the question is not what creativity is but how much of it, and of what magnitude. Kaufman and Beghetto's 2009 Beyond big and little: The four C model of creativity argued that the long-standing split between Big-C (the eminent, history-making achievement) and little-c (everyday problem solving) leaves out two more: mini-c, the personally meaningful insight of a learner, and Pro-c, the accomplished professional expertise that falls short of legend. The construct is a graded level of attainment along a developmental path, so a claim about creativity has to say which rung it means. The referent is a magnitude and a stage, not a within-person ability score, not the rating of a single product, and not a trait of an organisation.[4]

Unit

A level of creative attainment, from mini-c through Big-C

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Classification by kind and magnitude of accomplishment, using biographical and historical record for Big-C and self-report or teacher judgement for the smaller categories

Here creativity is an outcome of a social system at work: the novel and useful ideas, products, or procedures that people produce together inside an organisation. Woodman, Sawyer, and Griffin's 1993 Toward a theory of organizational creativity framed it as the joint result of individual traits, the groups people work in, and the organisational context of resources, culture, and leadership, rather than as a fixed property of any one worker. The construct is measured at the level of the person in a job, the team, or the firm, and it treats the surrounding conditions as part of what produces the result. The referent is creative output shaped by a workplace, not a raw ability score, not the rating of an isolated product, and not a rung on a ladder of eminence.[5]

Unit

Novel useful output of a person, team, or firm in context

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Supervisor ratings of employee creative performance, counts of ideas or patents, and scales for the contextual conditions thought to support it