How the creative balls rolls

One of the main criticisms to the general approach in creativity research, is the fact that creativity is often treated as a singular, homogeneous concept (Shalley, Zhou & Oldham, 2004; Unsworth, 2001, Sternberg, 2005). Critics of this singular-concept approach have been making small steps towards exploring the possible plural nature of creativity by advocating that creativity is domain specific rather than domain general. However, the debate is hindered by a plethora of both methodological and conceptual issues. This study aims to make a contribution to this ongoing debate of whether creativity should be considered homogeneous or heterogeneous. It intends to do so by focusing on how two possibly different types of creativity behave in relation to environmental influences. The two types of creativity central to this study are organizational creativity and artistic creativity. On organizational creativity much research has been done and thus a literature study suffices to determine factors of influence. However, this is not the case for artistic creativity and thus an empirical study was conducted to map the environmental factors that influence artistic creativity. Thus aims of this study are twofold: I) map the contextual factors influencing artistic creativity and II) contribute to the creativity-types debate. This has resulted in the research question: “How do artistic creativity and organizational creativity respond to environmental factors and to what extent does this provide basis for a meaningful distinction between them? In order to do so an interpretive study is conducted which takes the form of an exploratory, theory building qualitative study for the first aim of the study and a cross-sectional comparative case study for the second aim. Nine in-depth interviews were conducted with artists from various artistic disciplines to gain insight into contextual factors that influence artistic creativity. Factors that were found in the study can be roughly divided in four general thematic areas: social environment, physical environment, resources, reward and recognition. Interestingly, no large differences were found across artistic disciplines. When the found factors regarding artistic creativity were compared to those known in literature in relation to organizational creativity, the conclusion was drawn that there were quite significant differences. A deeper level of analysis then focused on the underlying principles driving responses to environmental influences. Two main underlying principles were found to be related to almost all contextual factors: artists’ pursuit of creative flow and the inner urge that drives artists to create art. These principles are based on process-related theories and thus required a slight extension of the scope of the study. The theory used to ground the findings in were those by Csikszentmihalyi on creative flow and on his conceptualization of the human drive to be innovative as the result of evolution. To conclude, the findings of the study indicate that although the influence of certain factors is consistent for organizational and artistic creativity, a variety of factors is distinctly different, evoked different responses or responses of a different magnitude. Based on this it is proposed that a meaningful distinction can indeed be made between organizational and artistic creativity, implying that in fact multiple types of creativity exist.