Individual Creativity in the Workplace

Rapid technological change, global competition, and economic uncertainty have all contributed to organizations seeking to improve creativity and innovation. Researchers and businesses want to know what factors facilitate or inhibit creativity in a variety of organizational settings. Individual Creativity in the Workplace identifies those factors, including what motivational and cognitive factors influence individual creativity, as well as the contextual factors that impact creativity such as teams and leadership.The book takes research findings out of the lab and provides examples of these findings put to use in real world organizations.

• Identifies factors facilitating or inhibiting creativity in organizational settings
• Summarizes research on creativity, cognition, and motivation
• Provides real world examples of these factors operating in organizations today
• Highlights creative thought processes and how to encourage them
• Outlines management styles and leadership to encourage creativity
• Explores how to encourage individual creativity in team contexts

Dr. Reiter-Palmon is the Varner Professor of Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology and the Director of the I/O Psychology Graduate Program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). She is also the Director of Innovation for the Center for Collaboration Science, an inter-disciplinary program at UNO. She received her Ph.D. in I/O Psychology from George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. Her research focuses on creativity and innovation in the workplace at individual and team level, development of leadership and creative problem-solving skills, and leading creative individuals. She is an associate editor for the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, as well as Frontiers: Organizational Psychology. She is the former Editor of The Psychology of Creativity, Aesthetics and the Arts, the leading journal on the psychology of creativity. She serves on the editorial boards of 10 additional journal in I-O psychology, management, and creativity. She has published four edited books on the topic of creativity, and is the editor of the Palgrave series on Creativity and Innovation in Organizations. She has obtained over 8 million dollars of funding from granting agencies, public and non-profit organizations, and businesses. She has been elected as a fellow of APA Division 10 (creativity) and division 14 (I-O) in recognition of her contribution to the field of organizational and team creativity.

James C. Kaufman is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author/editor of more than 45 books and 300 papers, which include theoretical contributions such as the Four-C Model of Creativity (with Ron Beghetto) and empirical work, such as the study that spawned the “Sylvia Plath Effect. He is a past president of Division 10 (Society for Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, & the Arts) of the American Psychological Association (APA). James has won many awards, including Mensa’s research award, the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and APA’s Berlyne, Arnheim, and Farnsworth awards. He co-founded two major journals (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and Psychology of Popular Media Culture). He has tested Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s creativity on CNN, appeared in the hit Australian show Redesign Your Brain, narrated the comic book documentary Independents, and is set to appear in a 2021 Netflix documentary. He wrote the book and lyrics to Discovering Magenta, which had its NYC premiere in 2015, and co-authored a book on bad baseball pitchers with his father.