Measuring Divergent Thinking Attitudes Related to Creative Problem Solving and Innovation Management

Abstract In an increasingly complex and changing business environment, creativity is becoming recognized as a critical success factor for organizations. The identification of attitudes toward creativity and the subsequent development of creative thinking are important mechanisms for organizations to encourage creativity across all employees. Employee attitudes toward creativity can indicate their potential for behaving in a creative manner, and organizations that can incorporate creativity into their organizational culture can further encourage creative thinking. This research extended previous research that had identified 2 divergent thinking attitudes related to organizational creativity. Three additional attitudes were identified as "valuing new ideas," "creative individual stereotypes," and "too busy for new ideas," using various psychometric and substantive analyses with 2 large samples including both business students and employees of industrial organizations. Basic scales were established to measure all 3 attitudes and future work to finalize the scales was laid out. This research also provided a psychometric methodology for identifying and developing measures of variables associated with creativity attitudes and behaviors. This framework may be useful to other researchers.