- Intrinsic motivation is widely considered essential to creativity because it facilitates more divergent thinking during problem solving. However, we argue that intrinsic motivation has been theorized too heavily as a unitary construct, overlooking various internal factors of a task that can shape the baseline level of intrinsic motivation people have for working on the task. Drawing on theories of cognitive styles, we develop a new scale that measures individual preferences for three different creative thinking styles that we call divergent thinking, bricoleurgent thinking, and emergent thinking. Through a multi-study approach consisting of exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and convergent validity, we provide psychometric evidence showing that people can have distinct preferences for each cognitive process when generating ideas. Furthermore, when validating this scale through an experiment, we find that each style becomes more dominant in predicting overall enjoyment, engagement, and creativity based onIntrinsic motivation is widely considered essential to creativity because it facilitates more divergent thinking during problem solving. However, we argue that intrinsic motivation has been theorized too heavily as a unitary construct, overlooking various internal factors of a task that can shape the baseline level of intrinsic motivation people have for working on the task. Drawing on theories of cognitive styles, we develop a new scale that measures individual preferences for three different creative thinking styles that we call divergent thinking, bricoleurgent thinking, and emergent thinking. Through a multi-study approach consisting of exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and convergent validity, we provide psychometric evidence showing that people can have distinct preferences for each cognitive process when generating ideas. Furthermore, when validating this scale through an experiment, we find that each style becomes more dominant in predicting overall enjoyment, engagement, and creativity based on different underlying structures of a task. Therefore, this paper makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to literature by unpacking intrinsic motivation, showing how the alignment between different creative thinking styles and task can be essential to predicting intrinsic motivation, thus reversing the direction of causality between the motivational and cognitive components of creativity typically assumed in literature.…
