The Profiles of Creative Potential and Personality Characteristics of Adult Professionals

Abstract

Using 5 divergent thinking indices of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, this study examined the creative profiles of 236 adult professionals and relationships between their creative characteristics and personality types. All these adults were in their middle or late stage of professional development in business, public service, journalism, or a similar profession. Distinctive profiles of creative and personality characteristics were found as a function of the domain. For example, the adults in business, journalism, and law had strength in fluency and a weakness in resistance to premature closure; those in medicine, and research and education showed strength in originality and a weakness in abstractness of titles. Those in business were mostly either an ESTJ or ISTJ type had lower levels of creativity than other professionals. Across the domains, the adults preferring intuition in perceiving information had higher creative potential than those preferring sensing. Domains were significant predictors of most of the tested creativity, even over and above the personality types. Overall, this study supported that creative potential, personality types, and domains are intertwined although further explorations are needed to identify causality among them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by Research Resettlement Fund for the new faculty of Seoul National University (SNU) and by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1A3A2055007). We thank the Creativity Development and Application (CDNA) Academy of the Creativity Engineering Institute for helping with data collection.

Notes

¹ In autonomous organizations, high levels of responsibility for defining and implementing goals, and setting performance standards are allowed to employees, whereas autonomy and authority granted to employees are relatively small in heteronomous organizations (see Scott, 1965 for more information).

² Due to the uneven sample size by domain, Scheffe tests were conducted (Hinkle, Wiersma, & Jurs, 2003).

³ Post-hoc tests were not conducted because each domain did not have a significant sample size (n = 8.37) for comparisons, which prevents the increase of the Type I errors.

⁴ Caution is needed for interpretation because the significant result might be due to the violation of the multivariate normality assumption for the test, while the non-significant result was led by the small sample or a lack of power (Green, Salkind, & Akey, 2000).