How do people come up with creative ideas that are also feasible?
Creativity is often associated with the ability to generate novel, original ideas and solutions. However, another aspect of creativity is that such ideas also need to be effective or feasible. Creativity provides a competitive advantage for many companies, but only when such ideas can in fact be effectuated. Much research has been devoted to understanding how organizations can stimulate and recognize employee creativity. Studies have, for instance, identified relationships between visionary and transformational leadership and employee creativity. And relevant for recruitment and selection purposes: some personality traits predict employee creativity, such as honesty-humility, extraversion, and openness to experience. However, most of this research has focused on the drivers of idea originality, or failed to distinguish feasibility of ideas from idea originality. Management scholars often relied on survey instruments, asking leaders to indicate to what extent they find an employee creative. Hence, given that perceptions of creativity likely involve assessments of originality and feasibility, it is unclear to what extent the cited studies show that leadership or employee personality predict originality or feasibility of ideas. Psychology researchers distinguish idea originality from feasibility. These scholars have identified various factors that stimulate originality of ideas – often relating to cognitive flexibility and persistent motivation – but they have been much less successful at identifying factors that promote idea feasibility. In this research project we contribute to opening the “black box” of idea feasibility by zooming in on a deep-level psychological process, that is, the ability to associate the goals one has with relevant means (i.e., means-end integration). Means-ends integration can be viewed and measured as a variable that differs between employees, but it likely can also be stimulated by organizational conditions, such as organizational diversity. The central prediction underlying the current project is that means-ends integration underlies the ability to connect originality and feasibility. We describe results from our first studies and invite discussion of our ideas.