PEROSNAL CREATIVITY

Personal Creativity

Personal Creativity

Introduction

Personal Creativity has been described as a “core leadership competence” an “essential component of effective organizational leadership”, and a “crucial qualification” for political leaders what does it mean for leadership to be creative? In what ways is leadership expected to be creative? This chapter explores those questions and others. (Andriopoulos, 2009)

The main body of this chapter is divided into four sections, the first of which explores the links between Personal Creativity and leadership in both theoretical and practical terms. The next section discusses a leader as a creative individual, and the third section examines the ways in which leadership can foster and encourage Personal Creativity in others within an organization. Then, the next section looks at ways in which groups create and the role of leadership in facilitating that Personal Creativity. Following that is a brief discussion of applications, future directions, and remaining questions. (Bilton, 2007)

Overview

Although human Personal Creativity has been a source of fascination and speculation for centuries, it did not become a focus of rigorous academic study until the 1950s. Since then, a multiplicity of approaches to Personal Creativity have arisen, most of which are rooted in specific academic disciplines. Identify seven major approaches to the study of Personal Creativity: mystical approaches, pragmatic approaches, psychodynamic approaches, psychometric approaches, cognitive approaches, social-personality approaches, and confluence approaches. Some of these approaches have a greater or lesser connection to leadership issues, and this chapter draws from several of the approaches but does not advocate or reject any particular one of them. (Andriopoulos, 2009)

Personal Creativity and Individual Leadership

A useful definition of Personal Creativity that incorporates the ideas of many current researchers is that Personal Creativity is the production of something innovative that has value. The Personal Creativity process—how that valuable innovation comes into being—is the subject of great debate and research, but a simple four-step process first proposed by Graham Wallas in 1926 has gained wide acceptance. The first step of this process is preparation. (Bilton, 2007) The creator examines and investigates the issue at hand, gathers information, analyzes needs, and evaluates possible courses of action. In the second step, incubation, the creator does not consciously think about the question but allows the unconscious mind to take over. This may continue for an indefinite period, and although this step may appear trivial, it cannot be skipped. It is a crucial step. The third step is illumination, when the creator begins to put the pieces together to solve the problem. The solution appears and the matter starts to fall into place. This may come as a flash of inspiration such as Archimedes' shout of “Eureka!” or it may be a more gradual and lengthy process. The final step is verification when the results of the illumination are tested and put in final form (Wallas, 1926/1976). The four-part process may repeat several times while working out separate portions of the creative project or the individual steps may be repeated more than once before ...