Perspectives on the Social Psychology of Creativity

Scholars began serious study into the social psychology of creativity about 25 years after the field of creativity research had taken root. Over the past 35 years, examination of social and environmental influences on creativity has become increasingly vigorous, with broad implications for the psychology of human performance, and with applications to education, business, and beyond. In this article, we revisit the origins of the social psychology of creativity, trace its arc, and suggest directions for its future

Helping You Help Me: The Role of Diagnostic (In)congruence in the Helping Process within Organizations

Through an inductive, multi-method field study at a major design firm, we investigated the helping process in project work and how that process affects the success of a helping episode, as perceived by help-givers and/or -receivers. We used daily diary entries and weekly interviews from four project teams, and a separate sample of critical incident interviews, to induce process models of successful and unsuccessful helping episodes. We found that, in unsuccessful episodes, help-givers and -receivers maintained incongruent expectations and project understandings throughout the episode, which we call diagnostic incongruence. In contrast, the parties in successful episodes engaged in aligning practices that fostered shared expectations and project understandings (i.e., diagnostic congruence). Importantly, aligning practices in successful episodes occurred before or at the beginning of episodes. We also found that people’s assessments of unsuccessful episodes were often marked by intense emotionality, which sometimes led them to disregard whether the helping resulted in instrumental progress. We discuss the implications of our process model for theory and practice

J. Richard Hackman (1940-2013)

When J. Richard Hackman died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 8, 2013, psychology lost a giant. Six and a half feet tall, with an outsize personality to match, Richard was the leading scholar in two distinct areas: work design and team effectiveness. In both domains, his work is foundational. Throughout his career, Richard applied rigorous methods to problems of great social importance, tirelessly championing multi-level analyses of problems that matter. His impact on our field has been immense

Knowledge and innovation: The strings between global and local dimensions of sustainable growth

The modern growth literature pays much attention to innovation and knowledge as drivers of endogenous developments in a competitive open economic system. This paper reviews concisely the literature in this field and addresses in particular micro- and macro-economic interactions at local or regional levels, based on clustering and networking principles, in which sustainability conditions also play a core role. The paper then develops a so-called knowledge circuit model comprising the relevant stakeholders, which aims to offer a novel framework for applied policy research at the meso-economic level

(Re) defining salesperson motivation: current status, main challenges, and research directions

The construct of motivation is one of the central themes in selling and sales management research. Yet, to-date no review article exists that surveys the construct (both from an extrinsic and intrinsic motivation context), critically evaluates its current status, examines various key challenges apparent from the extant research, and suggests new research opportunities based on a thorough review of past work. The authors explore how motivation is defined, major theories underpinning motivation, how motivation has historically been measured, and key methodologies used over time. In addition, attention is given to principal drivers and outcomes of salesperson motivation. A summarizing appendix of key articles in salesperson motivation is provided

In Pursuit of Everyday Creativity

Creativity researchers have long paid careful attention to individual creativity, beginning with studies of well-known geniuses, and expanding to personality, biographical, cognitive, and social-psychological studies of individual creative behavior. Little is known, however, about the everyday psychological experience and associated creative behavior in the life and work of ordinary individuals. Yet evidence is mounting that such individuals can be responsible for important instances of creativity and innovation in the world: open innovation, user innovation, and citizen innovation. Research into this phenomenon could do much to advance the study and practice of creativity

Big C, Little C, Howard, and Me: Approaches to Understanding Creativity Approaches to Understanding Creativity An Essay for a Festschrift in Honor of Howard Gardner

About 20 years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a small conference on creativity convened by Howard Gardner and David Perkins at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It was an intense weekend, with many deep, wide-ranging discussions on the nature of creativity, approaches to studying creativity, and the possibility of stimulating or facilitating creativity. I no longer recall all of the topics, or even all of the conference attendees, but one conversation stands out in my mind. It had started with the group considering progress in creativity research over the previous decade, trying to look into a future for the field that we would -we hoped -be instrumental in fashioning. Howard made an eloquent and impassioned statement about the importance of focusing on truly eminent creative individuals, like Freud and Picasso. I spoke just as passionately (though, I'm sure, less eloquently) about how crucial it was to understand more ordinary levels of creativity, like the work that produced the new theories, paintings, songs, and medicines making their appearance each year. Although we weren't using these terms, Howard was talking "Big C" creativity, and I was talking "Little c." In the realm of scholars thinking about what makes people more or less creative, he was focusing on the "more" -the forces operating on people who are more highly creative, over time, than anyone else. I was focusing on the "more 2 or less" -the forces that can make any individual more or less creative in a given moment. The question that nagged me that day, and nags me still, is whether we were talking apples and oranges. Does it make sense to call both "creativity"? Is there a single underlying process? What sort of understanding could each approach provide, and could they ultimately yield similar -or at least complementary -answers? My aim in this essay is to explore these questions and, I hope, offer some new insights. In the process, I aim to highlight some of the astonishing contributions that Howard has made to our understanding of this most astonishing form of human performance. Howard Gardner's "Big C" View of Creativity In his 1993 masterpiece on creativity, Creating Minds, Howard defines creative works as "the small subset" of works in a domain that are ever deemed to be "highly novel, yet appropriate for the domain" (p. 38); these works "actually cause a refashioning of the domain." Howard's massive study, reported in that book, focused squarely on the creative individual as the primary unit of analysis, with "creative individual" defined as "a person who regularly solves problems, fashions products, or defines new questions in a domain in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted practice in a particular cultural setting" (p. 35). Clearly, Howard's view is a Big C view of creativity, and his approach is a Big C approach. He writes, "There is a sense -for which I do not apologize -in which this study of creativity reflects the 'great man/great woman' view of creativity," (p. 37). Like most scholars working in the field, he uses novelty and appropriateness as the hallmarks of creative work. That is, when viewed by the domain experts who constitute a particular field, a creative work is seen as both novel and valuable. Where Howard stands outthough he does not stand alone -is in his focus on the very highest levels of pioneering achievement within a given domain. Howard writes admiringly of Howard Gruber's deep studies of how eminent individuals, such as Charles Darwin, developed pathbreaking ideas over long periods of time. Gruber's approach is the model on which Howard builds his study. This approach bears an enormous methodological advantage: In terms of creativity assessment, it is the firmest ground upon which a creativity scholar can stand. There is no need to be concerned with assessing creativity, if you focus on what Howard 4 calls "unambiguous instances of creative processes, as embodied in the behavior and thinking of productive artists, scientists, and other workers" (p. 22). His ambition, one that I believe he largely achieves, is to produce not only fascinating individual cases but also "generalizations that can elucidate creativity within and across domains" (p. 27). Howard proposes that the deep study of widely-recognized creative individuals, whether by his method or by historiometric studies of the socio-cultural forces operating on large numbers of such individuals across history, are the approaches most likely to yield deep insights into creativity