Creativity and Productivity: Resolving the Conflict‪.‬

In today's new economy, businesses must manage and motivate well-educated knowledge workers with less direct supervision. High levels of both individual productivity and creativity are required as we strive to quickly develop new products and services and continuously improve internal processes. Extrinsic, financial incentives are powerful and effective motivators of personal productivity but may not be the ideal approach when creativity and innovation are required. An impressive stream of research by Theresa Amabile emphasizes the important roles of freedom and intrinsic motivation in fostering creativity (Amabile 1983, 1988, 1997). These factors encourage thinking outside the box and provide internal, task-related rewards for exploring new ideas and creating new products, services, processes, etc. However, a potential problem with this approach is that intrinsically motivated activity may become so rewarding that the creative person is reluctant to move on to the hard work of evaluating the ideas and putting them into practice. Highly productive creative work is challenging. In fact, highly creative individuals say the most important characteristics that set them apart are curiosity and drive (Csikszentmihalyi 1996). These are described as "the yin and the yang" of creative work. Curiosity is open and playful, while drive is serious, competitive, and achievement-oriented. "Both are required for creativity to become actualized."