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ABSTRACT. Research has shown that creative style, as measured by the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI; M. J. Kirton, 1976), is correlated with more than 30 different personality traits. In this article, the author demonstrates that many of these correlations can be understood within the framework of the Five-Factor Model of personality and shows that the predominant correlates of creative style are personality indicators in the domains of the factors Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, and, to a lesser extent, Extraversion. These findings provide a basis for comparing the personality traits associated with creative style and occupational creativity. High scorers on the KAI (innovators) differ from both average and creative scientists but have personality characteristics similar to those of artists. This finding suggests that the artistic personality may be more common than is generally supposed and that common factors might underlie both artistic endeavor and creative style.
Key words: adaption-innovation, creativity, Five-Factor Model of personality
CREATIVE STYLE needs to be carefully distinguished from creativity. As Barron and Harrington (1981) noted, researchers have relied largely on two definitions of creativity. First, creativity has been defined as an ability manifested by performance on tests, particularly, but not exclusively, tests of divergent thinking. Second, creativity has been defined as a socially recognized achievement in which there are novel, useful products; this has led to the definition of certain fields of activity (music, art, and science, for example) and their practitioners as intrinsically creative. What both definitions share is the notion of creativity as a measure of capacity or ability; it makes sense to speak of an individual demonstrating or possessing a high or low level of creativity.
Creative style, however, is conceptually distinct from creativity as characterized in the foregoing definitions and is concerned with the way an individual approaches problem solving rather than with his or her creative ability. A relationship does not necessarily exist between an individual's creative style and his or her creative level. One of the most widely researched dimensions of creative style is adaption-innovation (Kirton, 1976), which is described as a cognitive preference appearing in situations involving creativity, problem solving, and decision making. At one end of the adaption-innovation continuum, adaptors characteristically devise solutions that conform to the orthodox paradigms and expectations of the...