Effectiveness of creativity training and its relation to selected personality factors

This exploratory study assesses the effectiveness of the Creative Problem Solving Program (Parnes, Noller and Biondi, 1977) for increasing the ideational fluency, flexibility and originality of trainees in a Master of Business Administration program. Pre- and post-training performances of trainees (N = 32) on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (verbal) are compared with a control group of MBA students (N = 44). Compared to the control group, trainees demonstrate significant gains in originality. While both groups show an improvement in fluency. Trainees with high preferences for achievement and dominance but low preference for deference are less likely than average to self-select for creativity training. Performance in a creativity project is positively related to preference for autonomy and creative ability, and negatively related to preference for achievement. Implications of these findings for the effectiveness of creativity training and the attitudes and performance of high need achievers are discussed. Finally, we discuss issues in the generalization and transfer of training to non-training domains.