دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی کاوش اثرات آموزش خلاق در عملکرد خلاق و خودکارآمدی خلاق: شواهدی از یک مطالعه طولی - وایلی 2018

ABSTRACT

In organizations and educational institutions, creativity trainings are the preferred approach to enhancing individual creative abilities. However, three issues regarding these trainings still remain largely unsolved. First, the question of how long-lasting creativity training effects are has not been sufficiently answered so far. Second, the question arises whether all participants benefit from such trainings equally in terms of their creative performance (CP). Third, an increasing number of studies have shown that creativity trainings may also be able to increase participants’ creative self-efficacy (CSE), that is, the confidence in one’s own creativity. Other studies, however, did not find evidence for this effect. Therefore, this article aims to address these issues by analyzing data from three measurement waves. Results reveal that participants’ CP increased during the training and decreased only slightly 4 weeks after the training. Additionally, we found an effect of diminishing training returns in that the higher a participant’s CP before the training the lower the training effect was. In contrast to most prior literature, we found no support for an effect of creativity training on participants’ CSE. We discuss these findings and offer implications for both theory and practice. Finally, we state this study’s limitations and derive avenues for further research.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

Our findings also provide concrete practical implications for educators and practitioners. First, our results find further evidence for the general effectiveness of creativity trainings and show support for the short-term sustainability of such trainings in particular. Thus, the results suggest that courses on creativity can be a viable approach to foster and improve creative skills among individuals. Practitioners might, therefore, be interested in approving and promoting an educational background in creativity when recruiting qualified personnel for jobs where these skills are especially beneficial. In addition, managers may encourage their employees to participate in creativity trainings to further develop their creative abilities.

Second, our findings revealed that participants’ creative ability before the training determined their individual training effectiveness. In particular, we found that participants with low initial performance took more from the training than participants that were already more creative. A practical explanation for that could be that the training procedures and content that we provided yield higher effectiveness for creative novices, since professional creativity depends much more on a complex interplay of cognitive, motivational, and situational prerequisites than on divergent ability alone (Mansfield et al., 1978). Cleary and Zimmerman (2001), for example, found that experienced basketball players have different training strategies than novices. For example, they set goals that are more specific and selected more technique-oriented strategies. Additionally, Ericsson (1998) found that to become a creative expert, deliberate training and daily practice are needed. Thus, it seems to be useful to identify participants’ initial creativity and to provide them either with a rather standardized training for “low creatives” or with a rather individual training for highly creative participants.