Educating Leaders Who Make a Difference in the World

When I set out to study creativity, in graduate school, I thought that it presented the most interesting intellectual puzzles I had encountered. Pondering the accepted definition of creativity in psychological science—the production of novel, appropriate ideas or solutions (Barron, 1968; Stein, 1974)—and the existing creativity literature at that time, I was thrilled by all there was to discover. What motivates people to come up with something novel and appropriate? What is the process by which they do so? Does their social environment make a difference— might an individual’s creativity vary as a function of the social situation, even for similar tasks in the same domain? Most creativity research done by the mid-1970s, when I was a doctoral student, had focused on the personality traits and biographical details of people who had been widely recognized for their creativity (e.g., Cox, 1926; Gruber & Barrett, 1974; MacKinnon, 1965). The social psychology of creativity was virtually untouched territory, and I could not wait to explore it. My aim, at that starting point, was purely to publish papers in psychology journals aimed at other psychological scientists. My initial experimental work exploring the influence of social factors on creativity was inspired by two sources. First, my graduate mentor, Mark Lepper, had recently published a ground-breaking experiment demonstrating the negative effect of contracted-for reward, an extrinsic motivator, on intrinsic motivation—the motivation to engage in an activity for its own sake because it is interesting, engaging, or personally challenging (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973). My second source of inspiration was the reading I had been doing in the letters, diaries, and autobiographies of well-known creative individuals (e.g., Einstein, 1949; Dostoevsky, described in Allen, 1948; Wolfe, 1936), which revealed that even they had experienced periods when a focus on extrinsic motivators or constraints dampened their intrinsic motivation and inhibited their creative work. Slowly, I became convinced that this was the place to start my empirical investigations: understanding whether extrinsic motivators and constraints in the social environment could undermine creativity by undermining intrinsic motivation. The series of experiments that followed, conducted with both children and adults, used a method I had developed for assessing creativity in social-psychological experiments; this consensual assessment technique required the creation of simple products that were then evaluated by judges familiar with products in that domain (Amabile, 1982). These experiments demonstrated that creativity can indeed be undermined by several extrinsic factors that also undermine intrinsic motivation: expected evaluation, surveillance while working, contracted-for reward, competition with peers, restricted choice in task materials, and a mere focus on extrinsic motivators. (See Amabile, 1983a, 1996, for descriptions and citations.) These early findings all supported the intrinsic motivation hypothesis of creativity: Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity, and extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity. Because later studies showed that rewards can, under certain conditions, support intrinsic motivation and creativity (Amabile, Hennessey, & Grossman, 1986; Hennessey, Amabile, & Martinage, 1989; Hennessey & Zbikowski, 1993), my collaborators and I updated our initial theorizing and articulated the revised intrinsic motivation principle of creativity: Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity, and controlling extrinsic motivation (in which the individual feels controlled by the motivator or constraint) is detrimental to creativity; however, synergistic extrinsic motivation (in which the external factor confirms the individual’s sense of competence or supports the individual’s engagement in the activity) can be conducive to creativity, especially when initial levels of intrinsic motivation are high (Amabile, 1993, 1996). On the basis of that body of early experimental work, which had been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and other psychology journals, 804172 PPSXXX10.1177/1745691618804172AmabileEducating Leaders Who Make a Difference research-article2018