Participants completed the Big Five NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992) as a personality measure, the Wonderlic Personnel Test (Wonderlic, 1992) as an intelligence measure, and four measures of creativity: Guilford’s (1967) unusual uses divergent thinking test; the Biographical Inventory of Creative Behaviours; a self-rated measure of creativity; and the Barron–Welsh Art Scale to measure creative judgement. Extraversion was significantly related to all four measures of creativity. Intelligence failed to add any incremental variance in predicting the creativity scores. Multiple regression indicated that up to 47% of the variance in divergent thinking scores can be accounted for by the Big Five personality traits. Personality correlates to creativity vary as a function of the creativity measure.
Despite its practical importance, the multidimensional nature of creativity makes it particularly difficult to define and measure (Amabile, 1996, George and Zhou, 2001, Runco, 2004 and Taylor, 1988). There are more than 60 definitions of creativity with no single authoritative and agreed upon definition, or operational measure. Nevertheless, the production of an idea or product that is both novel and useful is commonly accepted as a central characteristic of creativity ( Barron, 1955, Mumford, 2003a and Mumford, 2003b).
Increasing consensus amongst creativity researchers suggests that creativity in the individual will be reliant upon multiple components (Batey and Furnham, 2006, Guilford, 1950 and Runco, 2004). Suggestions for these components include cognitive ability, personality factors (Feist, 1998), cognitive style (Wallace, 1961) and motivation (Maslow, 1971). However, there is growing agreement on the individual differences correlates of creativity (Batey, 2007). It is argued that a basic level of intelligence is a necessary requirement for creativity in the generation and analysis of novel ideas (Silva, 2008 and Sternberg, 1997). However, intelligence only accounts for a small percentage of the variance, directing investigations towards personality correlates of creativity (Batey & Furnham, 2006). Equally it is suggested that the curiosity associated with Openness and the positiveness associated with Extraversion means trait variables are related to creativity.
Assessing creativity has mainly used divergent thinking (DT) measures and/or ratings of creativity as the main methods. However, Carroll (1993) suggested that creativity includes both fluency (numerate production of ideas) and originality (novel and unusual responses). Carrol concluded that intelligence factors such as verbal, visualisation and reasoning ability were found to be independent of creativity and that creativity is not the same as intelligence, but does require general mental abilities, such as the ability to think quickly. This suggests that a mixture of measures should be employed in order to appreciate the multidimensional nature of creativity (Sternberg & O’Hara, 2000).
