Effects of Social and Emotional Intelligence on the Creative Process and Individual Creativity

Abstract

This study proposes an individual creativity model that consists of personal psychological characteristics and creative processes. We argue that social intelligence and emotional intelligence, as personal psychological characteristics, significantly influence creativity, and analyze how they are related to the creative process and individual creativity. We assume that the creative process includes both exploitation and exploration, where exploitation is considered an existing use of the solution and exploration is believed to aid in the development of new solutions. Using a structural equation model to analyze 447 valid questionnaires collected from employees in the Korean IT industry, we find that the creative process and individual creativity are reinforced by high levels of social and emotional intelligence. Another interesting finding is that exploration reinforces individual creativity, while exploitation does not directly strengthen individual creativity ual creativity, Exploration, Exploitation, Social intelligence, Emotional intelligence.