Do Big Five Personality Factors Affect Individual Creativity - Essay Example

Personality Factors and Individual Creativity - Article Review Personality Factors and Individual Creativity - Article Review Summary ‘Do Big Five personality factors affect individual creativity? The moderating role of extrinsic motivation’ is a research paper by Sung and Choi. In their article, the authors identify that today creativity has become one of the most crucial factors contributing to individual performance in various domains of work. Hence, researchers and practitioners have been paying specific attention to creative performance. In this research work, Sung and Choi (2009) particularly focus on the potential trait-trait interaction between the Big Five personality factors (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience) and individuals’ motivational orientations in developing their creative performance. In contrast to the previous creativity studies where only one or two of the Big Five factors were considered, this study tries to expand the creativity literature by paying great attention to the relationships between each of the Big Five factors and creativity and testing them empirically. Referring to previous scholarly works on creative literature, the writers state that creativity is recognized as the result of the complex interaction between person and situation factors (Sung & Choi, 2009, p.942). The trait activation theory suggests that trait-relevant situational factors influence individuals to respond consistently or inconsistently with their innate traits, and this in turn would exaggerate the effect of personal dispositions on human behaviors such as creativity. With the support of previous research data, the researchers expected that the relationship between the Big Five factors and creativity will be stronger with the co-presence of strong motivation. In this paper, the authors try to make some valuable contributions to creativity literature in two ways. First, they examined the relationship between the Big Five factors and creative performance. Second, they focused on the trait-trait interaction perspective to gain a deep understanding of the effects that individuals’ dispositions have on creativity (Sung & Choi, p.943). In order to evaluate the hypotheses, Sung and Choi collected longitudinal data from 304 undergraduate students who were attending a North American business school. The authors hypothesized that extraversion, emotional stability, and openness to experience will be positively related to creative performance whereas agreeableness and conscientiousness will be negatively linked to creative performance. The article also considers the role of motivation in influencing the creative performance of individuals. The writers thought that the Big Five-creativity link would be more pronounced when individuals have increased motivation to complete the task. From the empirical outcomes, it is identified that extraversion and openness to experience can have significant positive effects on creative performance. The study results also show that there was a stronger positive relationship between openness to experience and creativity when the individual possessed strong extrinsic motivation. Empirical evidences suggest that agreeableness was positively related to creative performance only when the person possessed low level extrinsic motivation. This paper identifies extrinsic motivation as a meaningful moderator that influences the sense of personal traits in connection with individual creativity. However, these findings are not completely reliable as the study has several limitations. Since the current data were collected from students, the findings would not be generalizable to other populations. This study opens door to further investigations relating to the interrelationships between Big Five personality factors, extrinsic motivation, and individual creativity. Critical Analysis This article has great significance in the current context because today creativity is a crucial factor that determines the long term career success of an individual. According to Robledo, Hester, Peterson & Mumford (2011), companies seek to recruit creative workers and give increased emphasis to promoting employee creativity in order to survive the intense market competition in the current business environment (p.707). Evidences suggest that creativity and innovation have assisted many corporate enterprises to expand their business landscape and to enhance brand dignity. Therefore, the study of creativity is beneficial to both academic researchers and business practitioners. Although many of the previous studies tried to link individual creative performance with workplace characteristics, co-worker characteristics, and overall organizational culture, only a few of them paid attention to the possibility that creativity is influenced by individuals’ personal characteristics (Sung & Choi, p.942). Under those early efforts, the Big Five model was used to evaluate the influence of personality traits on creativity. However, those researches attempted to focus on just one or two measures of the Big Five model, and hence the scope of such studies was very limited. In this work, it is interesting to see that the researchers employed a comprehensive methodology to develop a theoretical rationale regarding the relationships between each of the Big Five measures and creativity. Similarly, this research work took the element of motivation into account so as to establish a proper link between personality traits and creative performance. Traditionally, motivation has been considered a crucial mediator describing the contextual characteristics and creativity. In contrast to the conventional beliefs, the authors tell that motivation would play the role of a moderator in addition to being a mediator. They also developed a new idea that motivation may influence creativity by interacting with individual variables rather than contextual factors. The most fascinating finding of Sung and Choi is that motivation may affect creativity by interacting also with other individual dispositions like personality. Another exciting aspect of this study is that it considers the possibility that an innate characteristic of the individual could be capable of moderating the relationship between a trait and creative performance, instead of just focusing on the interaction between person and situation. As the paper emphasizes the moderating role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in addition to the significant effects of the Big Five factors on the creative performance, it effectively incorporates the trait-trait interaction. Among the Big Five factors, extraversion has not been frequently investigated by researchers or received much empirical support as a positive predictor of creativity. However, this study established a strong positive link between extraversion and creative performance. To justify their views, the authors indicate that individuals with high extraversion are more likely to find stimulation whereas passive people wait for someone to stimulate them and hence they are less likely to be creative. It is interesting to note the scholars’ finding that extraverts tend to develop innovative ways of doing tasks and to vie with problems instead of avoiding them, which is likely to lead to enhanced creative performance. Based on this realization, HR managers may try to hire employees who are energetic, enthusiastic, and ambitious so as to improve the creative performance of the workforce. In addition, managers can use different motivational strategies to keep their audience enthusiastic and ambitious, and enhance employee creativity in the workplace. Based on empirical evidence, this research work proposed that high openness to experience would influence people to move away from traditional beliefs and conventions and encourage them to think in unique and novel ways (Sung & Choi, p.952). It is a valuable finding that the association between openness to experience and creativity became stronger when individuals were highly motivated extrinsically to perform tasks. This information is really beneficial for managers to use the tools of extrinsic motivation effectively to persuade individuals with high openness to experience to act more strongly on their innate trait. It also points to the fact that extrinsic motivation can positively influence the functioning of an individual’s openness trait thus supporting the trait activation theory and trait-trait interaction perspective. A key finding of this research paper is that extrinsic motivation can do nothing to stimulate the creative performance of agreeable people. The authors state that individuals with high agreeableness tend to care about others, and hence prefer supporting others’ ideas and opinions with intent to keep the peace. Evidently, those people’s creative performance will be further affected once they are bothered about compensation or rewards. At the same time, agreeableness will be positively linked to creativity when the individual’s level of extrinsic motivation is low and he/she is less embarrassed by others’ opinions. This is absolutely useful information for management practitioners and other leaders to increase the performance creativity of their followers by managing their extrinsic motivation level thoughtfully. As discussed already, this research work is not free from limitations despite its comprehensiveness and great empirical support. All variables employed in the study were self-reported and hence the accuracy of the results might have been affected by same-method bias (p.954). Considering the possible differences between self and observer ratings, it is recommendable for future researchers to employ a multisource design methodology to gain a more robust set of research findings. One of the major limitations of this study is that it does not address situational and contextual factors that might explain variance in creativity (p.954). In future research works, it is advisable to include various situational and contextual variables to identify their moderating influences on the trait-trait interactions found in this paper. Despite these limitations, the researchers succeeded in proving the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and individual creativity using empirical evidences. The essence of this study is that an individual’s openness and agreeableness can affect his/her creative performance in two different directions (p.952). Hence, it can be assumed that personality traits and motivation work together to result in particular individual behavior. In addition, the element of extrinsic motivation may influence individual creativity differently in different situations. In this context, it is good to discuss why it is not advisable to use extrinsic motivation strategies in every situation to promote individual creativity (A question for discussion). References Robledo, I. C., Hester, K. S., Peterson, D. R & Mumford, M. D. “Creativity in organizations: Conclusions”. Chapter 27 In Handbook of Organizational Creativity. Mumford, M. D. (Ed.). (2011). US: Academic Press. Sung, S. Y & Choi, J. N. (2009). Do Big Five Personality Factors affect individual creativity? The moderating role of extrinsic motivation. Social Behavior and Personality, 37 (7): 941-956. Read More