MEASURING DIVERGENT THINKING ATTITUDES RELATED TO CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT

In an increasingly complex and changing business environment creativit y is becoming recognized as a critical success factor for organization s. The identification of attitudes toward creativity and the subsequen t development of creative thinking are important mechanisms for organi zations to encourage creativity across all employees. Employee attitud es toward creativity can indicate their potential for behaving in a cr eative manner, and organizations that can incorporate creativity into their organizational culture can further encourage creative thinking. This research extended previous research that had identified 2 diverge nt thinking attitudes related to organizational creativity. Three addi tional attitudes were identified as ''valuing new ideas,'' ''creative individual stereotypes,'' and ''too busy for new ideas, '' using vario us psychometric and substantive analyses with 2 large samples includin g both business students and employees of industrial organizations. Ba sic scales were established to measure all 3 attitudes and future work to finalize the scales was laid out. This research also provided a ps ychometric methodology for identifying and developing measures of vari ables associated with creativity attitudes and behaviors. This framewo rk may be useful to other researchers.