Abstract
This contribution to the Festschrift for Teresa Amabile describes the importance of intrinsic motivation for creativity and looks back at how the concept of intrinsic motivation has changed over the years. Early on the connection to creativity was vague and non-experimental, but then Amabile developed methods with good controls and in turn was able to avoid the ambiguities of earlier research. The present chapter puts intrinsic motivation into a larger context where it works with various other components of the creative process, including cognition. It also touches on the Consensual Assessment Technique. This in turn leads to a discussion of the value of creative products. These offer very different information from that obtained when focusing on the creative process, and often nothing can be said about how creativity comes about (i.e., the underlying mechanism) by looking only at the outcome or product. Another concern is raised, namely about generalizations from any one group of judges involved in judging creative products. This chapter concludes by acknowledging the very broad and positive impact that Amabile has had on creativity research.
An earlier version of this chapter was presented at Harvard Business School August 14, 2019.
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Runco, M.A. (2020). A Hobby Out of Control: Festschrift for Teresa Amabile. In: Reiter-Palmon, R., Fisher, C.M., Mueller, J.S. (eds) Creativity at Work. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Innovation in Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61311-2_16
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