Styles of Managerial Creativity: A Comparison of Adaption‐Innovation in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Unites States1

SUMMARY Kirton has proposed that creative styles form a continuum from the most adaptive (implying a preference for solving problems through incremental improvement with the system) to the most innovative (preference for restructuring the system in order to solve the problem). This dimension of creative style has traditionally been measured by the Kirton adaption-innovation inventory (KAI), a 32-item measure that contains three factors: sufficiency vs. proliferation of originality, efficiency and rule-conformity. Studies of mid-career MBA students in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States indicate that members of the more externally orientated managerial functions (such as marketing and strategic planning) score more innovatively than more internally orientated managers (e.g. in production management, accounting and quality control). However, the research shows that within each of the major functional areas of management, relatively internally orientated and relatively externally orientated management groups can be identified; moreover, the latter score significantly more innovatively than the former. The paper discusses the relevance of these findings to the management of change in organizations (especially in view of recent claims that all managers must embrace and cope with radical and turbulent change), and for the composition and management of effective task groups. Recent criticism has alleged that abridged measures of the KAI (consisting respectively of 20 and 13 of its items) provide more coherent and orthogonal subscales, and that use of the factors comprising adaption-innovation would elucidate managerial behaviour. These propositions are tested by employing all three versions of the KAI in the analysis. The results lead to the conclusion that the three versions of the KAI produce identical results with respect to the creative styles of managerial functions and subfunctions and that the use of the subscales adds little, if anything, to our understanding of managerial creativity.