The Creative Thinking Profile: Measuring Internal Preferences for Multiple Creative Thinking Styles

Abstract

Creative problem solving in organizations is getting more complex, and yet theory on creative thinking has remained stagnant as scholars have argued for the need to better understand the multifaceted nature of creativity. This paper helps advance research on this topic by developing and validating a new scale that measures individual preferences for multiple creative thinking styles. Drawing upon a wide range of literature that has theorized about several cognitive processes people can use to generate novel and useful ideas on a task, we found evidence through psychometric research that people can have distinct preferences for three different thinking styles, which we call divergent thinking, bricoleurgent thinking, and emergent thinking. Furthermore, when validating this scale through an experiment, we found that each style seems to be more strongly aligned with different underlying structures of a creative task, which varied based on the degree to which the problem was either open versus closed and the resources available were either abundant versus constrained. Altogether, this paper makes both theoretical and empirical contributions by developing a scale that integrates multiple thinking styles into a creative thinking profile, which can help scholars better understand—and study—the complex nature of creativity in future research.