Assessing Ideational and Evaluative Skills and Creative Styles and Attitudes

This article describes the rationale for the multiphase creative problem solving process, and reports the findings from an empirical investigation conducted to facilitate the problem solving of managers. The ideational skills of the managers were assessed before and after training in a complete process of creative problem solving, along with their ideational attitudes, creative problem solving style (i.e., generator, conceptualizer, optimizer, or implementor), and evaluative skill (i.e., ability to recognize original ideas). The most important findings indicated that the training had a significant impact on the evaluative accuracy of the managers. They were significantly more accurate in their judgments about original ideas after training, both in their identification of original ideas and their recognition of unoriginal ideas. After training, the managers also gave more solutions and more original solutions to problems. Finally, several variables (e.g., the “preference for active divergence” attitude, and the conceptualizer process style) seemed to moderate the impact of training. Training was therefore effective, with specific effects that can be predicted from pre‐training individual differences in attitudes and process style.