Mentoring functions: Interpersonal tensions are associated with mentees’ creative achievement.

Abstract

There are different functions a mentor can perform for a mentee. The literature on mentoring creativity reveals many proposed functions for mentees' creativity like advancing relevant skills, role-modeling, career-related and psychosocial support. However, only qualitative studies actually investigated how different functions each contribute each specifically to mentees' creativity. Accordingly, research broadly discusses "mentoring works", but no quantitative study looked further into mentoring functions for the field of creativity. The association between these functions and creativity was investigated in an online study with 161 participants including artists, writers, and scientists using existing items from two mentoring scales. Additionally, we measured ability to be autonomously creative with a self-developed scale. We first performed a factor analysis on mentoring items. Several distinguishable functions emerged: Advancing domain relevant skills, role-modeling, interpersonal tensions, career-related and psychosocial support. Creative autonomy was related to psychosocial support. Second, we investigated whether different mentoring functions are associated with everyday creativity and creative achievement, that is, checked for concurrent validity of interpretation. Surprisingly, functions proposed in the mentoring literature could not predict creative outcomes, but interpersonal tensions did for creative achievement. We hypothesize results could be explained by a demanding achievement-orientation of mentors; or arguing about ideas in non-hierarchical relationships.

Judging Popular Novels as Creative Products: Which Creative Attributes Contribute to their Success?

“…Creative writing expertise. Because we consider expertise to exist on a continuum (Hekkert & Van Wieringen, 1996;Plucker, Kaufman, & Temple, 2009), we measured participants' expertise in creative writing with the relevant part of the German version (Form, Schlichting, & Kaernbach, 2017) of the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005). The CAQ is a self-report measure asking for accomplishments in creative domains.…”

More is not always better: The differentiated influence of empathy on different magnitudes of creativity

“…In order to measure creative achievement, participants gave self-reports in the form of the German version ( Form et al, 2017 ) of the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ, Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005 ). The CAQ specifically asks for accomplishments in ten creative fields, so called domains such as “visual arts”, “creative writing” or “scientific discovery”.…”

“…It emphasizes the “Big C-creativity” ( Silvia et al, 2012 ) or in another terminology “Pro c-creativity” ( Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009 ): highly creative contributions, accepted and acknowledged by the social environment. Example items are “I have had a showing of my work in a gallery.” or “I have sold one of my inventions to people I know.” The German version of the CAQ has good concurrent and discriminant validity ( Form et al, 2017 ). Because items of the CAQ scale are not like Likert-items, but based on a step-wise model, we do not report Cronbach’s alpha for the CAQ ( Silvia et al, 2012 ).…”

“…If one wants to practice one’s creative activities in private, one can easily do so, representing an internal frame of reference. In fact, everyday creative activity is more associated with being creative independently from the social environment than achievement ( Form, Schlichting, & Kaernbach, 2017 ). While a certain level of empathy is needed (or at least helpful) for social interactions arising from creative activity, too much empathy should be a drawback.…”

Measuring the Aesthetic Success of Books: Can User-driven Databases Fill the Gap?

“…In fact, being recognized not only by some specialized experts, but by the public (e.g. in nationwide publications) is considered a higher contribution to a field in the stepwise-ranked items of the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, which is a widely used measure for an individual's creativity (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005;Form, Schlichting, & Kaernbach, 2017).…”