درباره رابطه بین خلاقیت فردی و مدیریت زمان

The article investigates the relationship between time management behaviours and attitudes with measures of creativity, as assessed by self-rated creativity and a measure of creative personality. Additionally, total creativity is examined, as the sum of the two creativity constructs when z-scored. Using data from a survey of 186 participants, results suggest that creativity is positively related to daily planning behaviour, confidence on long-range planning, perceived control of time and tenacity and negatively related to preference for disorganization. These results have theoretical implications for understanding how creativity relates to time management. Implications of the results are considered and future research directions identified.

In today's rapidly changing environment and expanding global competition there is a continuing and ever-growing recognition on creativity and the management of time. Creativity is considered as a key to personal and organizational social prosperity; creativity signifies the production of novel and useful ideas, and marks the starting point for innovation and entrepreneurship (Amabile, 1996 and Zampetakis and Moustakis, 2006). Time, on the other hand, represents a commodity that needs to be efficiently managed, not to mention that, more often than not, effective time management is a key indicator of organizational competitive edge (Claessens, van Eerde, Rutte, & Roe, 2007). Early research on creativity has demonstrated that time is an important resource (Wallas, 1926). Time for instance, is important for incubation; individuals should be given sufficient time if they are expected to do creative work (Runco, 2007). According to Mednick (1962), original ideas tend to be remote and are usually found far away from the original problem or initial idea. This remoteness requires time; it takes time to move from idea to idea to idea, and to find the remote associate. Although time has been frequently used as a variable or as an implied dimension in creativity research, no empirical studies to date have been undertaken to integrate knowledge about the relation of time management with creativity. Empirical evidence on the relationship between creativity and time has been limited basically to the effects of time pressure to creative outcomes in organizations (Amabile et al., 1996 and Amabile et al., 2002). Researchers have paid scant attention to the relationship between individual creativity and individual time management practices. Considering the importance of creativity and time management, the gap in research and literature on the relationship between individual creativity and time management practices forms a notable deficiency.

To our knowledge, the present study is the first that attempts to empirically explore the relationships between creativity and time management behaviour and attitudes. Correlation analyses and independent t-tests were conducted with undergraduate student data from Greek universities. Specifically, our results suggested that self-perceived creativity is positively related to daily planning, confidence on long-range planning, total time management, perceived control of time, tenacity, and negatively related to preference for disorganization. In addition, we found moderate to large effect sizes of the mean differences observed on the aforementioned variables between high and low creative individuals. The exploratory and cross-sectional research presented herein, despite limitations, can provide some insights regarding the relation between creativity and the management of time. Before turning to the broader implications of this study, certain limitations should be noted. To begin, while adequate for the nature of the study, the sample is somewhat homogeneous with the majority (almost 60%) being engineering students. It is not clear that the responses of these participants can be generalized to older employees in organizational settings. Generalizing the results, therefore, from college students should be done with caution. Additionally, it is plausible that results would be quite different with a population of art students. Furthermore, while the instruments used in this study appear to have been adequate, they provided only self-report data. Future research is needed using experimental methods to measure the relationship between creativity and time management. Furthermore future research could employ other creativity measures such as the Kirton Adaption Innovation Inventory (KAI) (Kirton, 1976) the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1988) or the Consensual Assessment Technique (Amabile, 1982). Future research should also account for potentially confounding variables in the creativity-time management relationship such as metacognition. Britton and Glynn (1989) refer to metacognition as an executive system overseeing and supervising the operations of cognition. They suggest metacognition is “mental time” that must be managed by creative individuals. Individuals who fail to manage this mental time are not in control of their processing resources, and are thus fated to uncertain outcomes. In contrast, creative individuals who are able to manage their mental time have a much greater likelihood of meeting their creative goals. Finally, it should be recognized that in this study we implicitly used the term “time” as embedded into a social context. This conceptualization of time can vary among individuals, organizations, or societies (Collinson & Cook, 2001). However, a dimension of individual time-related differences that is critical to the understanding of creative endeavors is the notion of “timelessness” (Mainemelis, 2001 and Mainemelis, 2002). Timelessness is the experience of losing oneself in one's work such that one seems to transcend time. This is in line with Csíkszentmihályi (1990) concept of flow. Flow is a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus and full involvement. Focus and concentration hold the key to achieving flow. Many of the peculiarities attributed to creative persons are really just ways to maintain concentration and lose themselves in the creative process. Future research should examine whether and how “timelessness” and flow are managed. Even bearing these caveats in mind, we believe that the results obtained in this study have some noteworthy theoretical and practical implications. To begin, time management has not received much attention in studies of creativity. Nonetheless, there is reason to suspect that time management may relate to creativity, as people seek to adapt their actions to an envisioned future. And, in fact, the results obtained in this study regarding the relationship between time management behaviours and creativity provides some support for this proposition. Results showed that individual creativity was significantly related to time management behaviours (daily planning, and confidence on long-range planning) and time attitudes (perceived control of time, tenacity and preference for disorganization). Correlations were found to be stronger when creativity was considered as product oriented (focusing on the extent to which outcomes are useful and novel) compared to correlations obtained with a general creative personality construct (i.e. CPS). This implies that planning daily activities, prioritizing them, and having a confidence on long-range planning are more relevant to the production of novel and useful ideas. In other words our results suggest that time management behaviours may be necessary for the effective exploitation of creative ideas. Furthermore we examined subgroups based on level of creativity in order to investigate potentially systematic changes in terms of time management attitudes and behaviours. Students belonging to the high-creativity group scored higher in all time management and attitudes scales.