Personality types and scholarly creativity in undergraduate students: The mediating roles of creative styles

Abstract

Guided by an integrative model of Jung's personality type theory, Kirton's adaption-innovation theory, and Kaufman's creativity domain theory, this study examined the mediating role of creative styles in the association between personality types and scholarly creativity in undergraduate students. 495 undergraduate students (305 girls, mean age=19.55years) completed questionnaires on personality types, creative styles and scholarly creativity. Results indicated that the innovative creative style was positively associated with Extroversion and Perceiving personality types, and negatively associated with Feeling type. The innovative creative style, but not the adaptive creative style, was positively associated with scholarly creativity. Furthermore, Extroversion and Perceiving types were positively and indirectly associated with scholarly creativity completely through the mediator of innovative creative style, whereas Feeling type was negatively and indirectly associated with scholarly creativity partially through the mediator of innovative creative style. This study enhances our understanding of the ways in which personality types could affect undergraduates' scholarly creativity. These findings suggest that undergraduate students of different personality types tend to perform creative work in different creative styles, further influencing how much scholarly creativity they could demonstrate.