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dissertation entitled

WHAT IS CREATIVE AND WHAT IS NOT:
THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL NORMS FOR CREATIVITY
IN ADVERTISING AGENCIES

presented by
MARK WILSON STUHLFAUT

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2/05 p:/C|RC/DateDue.indd-p.1

WHAT IS CREATIVE AND WHAT IS NOT:
THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL NORMS FOR CREATIVITY
IN ADVERTISING AGENCIES
By

Mark Wilson Stuhlfaut

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Advertising, Public Relations, and Retailing

2006

ABSTRACT
WHAT IS CREATIVE AND WHAT IS NOT:
THE INFLUENCE OF SOCLAL NORMS FOR CREATIVITY
IN ADVERTISING AGENCIES
By
Mark Wilson Stuhlfaut
Creativity in advertising has been described and discussed extensively by
academicians and practitioners, typically as an intrapersonal or group process with ﬁve
stages: problem-identiﬁcation, preparation, generation, validation, and outcome. An
understanding of creativity in advertising, however, is incomplete without considering the
social norms that strongly inﬂuence the process. This study theorized that there are
powerﬁrl social norms for creativity, deﬁned as what is creative and what is not, that
inﬂuence the creative process directly through affecting the perceptions of creativity
among copywriters and art directors in advertising agencies and indirectly through
intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. A national cross—sectional online survey asked these
creative professionals for their deﬁnition of what is and is not creative. It measured
social norms for creativity along three dimensions: strength, consensus and
conditionality; and, it tested 18 hypotheses and a model of the creative process to ﬁnd the
signiﬁcant pathways. A structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis indicated that the
proposed model was acceptable. The data supported the hypothesized direct effects of
social norms for creativity on synergistic extrinsic motivation and on the preparation and
validation stages of the creative process. Social norms for creativity also affected the
validation Stage indirectly through synergistic extrinsic motivation. In addition, several

unexpected relationships were found. The implication of the study is that advertising

agencies need to know more about the operant social norms for creativity to ﬁrlly utilize
those standards deemed useful and to challenge those standards that may restrict new
breakthroughs. Implications also exist beyond advertising to other creative endeavors in
group settings, because these sites also can be expected to have social norms for

creativity.

Copyright by Mark Wilson Stuhlfaut, 2006

This dissertation is dedicated to my wife, Jeanie, for all her love, support, and
encouragement from the beginning to the end of my journey through graduate school.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge and thank the following people, without whom I could not

have completed this program:

Dr. Bruce Vanden Bergh, committee chair, and my mentor for four years. His
guidance and support were invaluable to me, as I wandered through the wilderness of

creativity.

Dr. Carrie LaFerle, a member of my dissertation committee, who provided
exceptional direction and critical review of my research ﬁ'om start to ﬁnish, and who was

a valued mentor during my graduate and graduate teaching programs.

Dr. Nora Rifon, a member of my dissertation committee, who not only provided
encouragement and direction, but also expanded my understanding of the literature and

the academic process.

Dr. R. Dale Wilson, a member of my dissertation committee, who not only
contributed signiﬁcantly to the approach and methods of the study, but also to the overall

direction of my unfolding professional career.

Dr. Bonnie Reece, chair of the department for most of my tenure at Michigan
State University, who encouraged my application to the program and who counseled me

in all matters of academia and advertising.

Dr. Charles Salmon, Nancy Ashley and the rest of the staff in the College of

Communication Arts and Sciences, who were so generous of their time and support.

vi

Dr. Hee Sun Park, for assistance with hierarchical linear modeling and the

analysis of nonindependence.

My professors, Doctors J ohnanes Bauer, Franklin Boster, Judi Burgoon, Pam
Carnpanelli, Robert LaRose, Mark Levy, Hairong Li, Steve Kozlowski, F olu Ogundimu,

Dan Shaver, Gwen Wittenbaum, and Linn Van Dynes.

Last, but not least, my fellow graduate students, Sun Ahn, Josh Azriel, Susan
Chang, Clay Dedeaux, Arvind Diddi, Jung Hyun (Paul) Kim, Karen Lancendorfer,
Doohwang Lee, Ki-Young Lee, Fang (Ali) Liu, Xun (Sunny) Liu, Mariko Morimoto, Jay
Newell, Liz Quilliam, Vicki Van Hurley, and Bill Ward who shared their knowledge,

support and friendship.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ xi
LIST OF FIGURES _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ xv
KEY TO SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS ________________________________________________________________ xvr
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1
Conceptual Framework _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1
Purpose ................................................................................................................................. 2
Signiﬁcance of Study .......................................................................................................... 2
CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ................................................................... 5
Creativity ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 5
Deﬁnition and Approach ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 5
Creativity as an Internal Process __________________________________________________________________________________ 7
Motivational Orientation ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 8
Work-related Motivational Orientation _______________________________________________________________ 1 0
Motivation and Creativity ..................................................................................... 13

A Motivation-based Approach to the Internal Creative Process _______________________ 15

Evidence of Individual-focused Creativity in Advertising ...................................... 21
Creativity as a Social Process _____________________________________________________________________________________ 22
Evidence of Creativity in Advertising as a Social Process _______________________________________ 2 5
External Pressures on the Creative Process _______________________________________________________________ 26
Structure ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 27

Mission __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 31

Resources ............................................................................................................... 32

Climate ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 32

Culture ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 33

Social Norms _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 34
Deﬁnition ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 34
Dimensions __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 36
Purposes of Social Norms ........................................................................................... 38
Inﬂuence of Social Norms .......................................................................................... 38
Sanctions ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 4 0

Social Norms and the Workplace ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 4 1

Social Norms for Creativity ________________________________________________________________________________________ 4 2
Deﬁnition _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 4 3
Dimensions ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 4 7

Other Research ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ 48

Social Norms and Motivation 49

viii

 

A Study of Social Norms for Creativity ..................................................... 50
Hypotheses for the Effects of Social Norms for Creativity on Motivation ............. 52
Hypotheses for the Effects of Motivation on the Creative Process _________________________ 53
Hypotheses for the Effects of Social Norms for Creativity on the

Creative Process ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 54
Delimitations ............................................................................................................... 57
Limitations and Assumptions ..................................................................................... 59

CHAPTER 3: METHODS ...................................................................................................... 62

Research Design ................................................................................................................ 62

Sample ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 62

Procedures __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 63

Instrument .......................................................................................................................... 64

Subjective Measures .......................................................................................................... 64
Social Norms for Creativity (Independent Variable) ________________________________________________ 64
Intrinsic Motivation (Moderating Variable) .............................................................. 65
Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation (Moderating Variable .......................................... 65
Non-synergistic Extrinsic Motivation (Moderating Variable ___________________________________ 67
Stages of the Creative Process (Dependent Variables) ............................................. 67

Objective Measures ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 68

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS ........................................................................................................ 69

Analysis of Responses ....................................................................................................... 69

Descriptive Measures of the Sample ________________________________________________________________________________ 70

Representativeness of the Responding Agencies ............................................................ 72

Independent Variable: Social Norms for Creativity ________________________________________________________ 73
Qualitative Measures .................................................................................................. 73

What Is Creativity _________________________________________________________________________________________________ 73
What Is not Creativity ........................................................................................... 78
What Is Creativity in Layouts .............................................................................. 82
Quantitative Measures ________________________________________________________________________________________________ 85

Strength __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 85

Consensus .............................................................................................................. 87

Conditionality ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 92

A Measure of Social Norms for Creativity ......................................................... 9O

Dependent Variables ......................................................................................................... 95
The Issue of Independence in the Data ______________________________________________________________________ 95
Reﬁnement of the Dependent Variables ____________________________________________________________________ 97

Intrinsic Motivation .............................................................................................. 97

Non-synergistic Extrinsic Motivation __________________________________________________________________ 98

Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation ......................................................................... 99

Problem Identiﬁcation ........................................................................................ 100

Preparation ........................................................................................................... 101

Response Generation .......................................................................................... 102

Response Validation ___________________________________________________________________________________________ 104

General Qualitative and Quantitative Conclusions about Variables ............................ 108

ix

Testing the Hypotheses ................................................................................................... 1 10

Additional Signiﬁcant Findings _____________________________________________________________________________________ 117
Summary of Signiﬁcant Paths in Proposed Model ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 118
Testing of the Creative Process Model __________________________________________________________________________ 121
CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION ................................................................................................ 123
Findings ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 123
Implications _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 126
Limitations ....................................................................................................................... 127
Possible Improvements and New Directions _________________________________________________________________ 128
Conclusion _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 134
APPENDIX 1: SOLICITATION MATERIALS ________________________________________________________________ 137
APPENDIX 2: INSTRUMENT ____________________________________________________________________________________________ 140
REFERENCES 153

......................................................................................................................

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Socio-environmental Contingencies to Creativity .................................................. 14
Table 2: The Creative Imperative Model _______________________________________________________________________________ 28
Table 3: Responses per Agency .............................................................................................. 69
Table 4: Agency Stimuli and Responses ________________________________________________________________________________ 70
Table 5: Represented Agencies by Number of Employees ___________________________________________________ 72
Table 6: Qualities of Creativity in Advertising _____________________________________________________________________ 74
Table 7: Categories of Responses from Four Agencies ________________________________________________________ 77
Table 8: What Is Not Creative in Advertising ....................................................................... 80
Table 9: What Makes a Layout Creative ________________________________________________________________________________ 83
Table 10: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Strength by Individual _________________________________________ 86
Table 11: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Strength by Agency _____________________________________________ 86
Table 12: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Strength using

Participants in Agencies with Multiple Responses ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 86
Table 13: Observed Factor Matrix for Strength ..................................................................... 87
Table 14: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Consensus by Individual _____________________________________ 88
Table 15: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Consensus by Agency ......................................... 88
Table 16: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Consensus using

Participants in Agencies with Multiple Responses ______________________________________________ 88
Table 17: Observed Factor Matrix for Consensus _________________________________________________________________ 89
Table 18: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Conditionality by Individual _______________________________ 90
Table 19: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Conditionality by Agency ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 90
Table 20: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Conditionality by using

Participants in Agencies with Multiple Responses ______________________________________________ 91
Table 21: Observed Factor Matrix for Strength _____________________________________________________________________ 91

xi

Table 22:

Table 23:

Table 24:

Table 25:

Table 26:

Table 27:

Table 28:

Table 29:

Table 30:

Table 31:

Table 32:

Table 33:

Table 34:

Table 35:

Table 36:

Table 37:

Table 38:

Table 39:

Table 40:

Table 41:

Component Matrix of SNC Items .......................................................................... 93

ANOVA of SNC by Gender __________________________________________________________________________________ 93
AN OVA of SNC by Age Categories _____________________________________________________________________ 94
AN OVA of SNC by Employment at Current Agency _________________________________________ 94
ANOVA of SNC by Length of Career in Advertising ......................................... 94
ANOVA of SNC by Job Categories ______________________________________________________________________ 94
ANOVA of SNC by Size ongency _____________ 94
ANOVA of SNC by Number of Responses per Agency ______________________________________ 94
Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Intrinsic Motivation .......................... 97
Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the

Factor of Intrinsic Motivation

98

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to

Nonsynergistic Extrinsic Motivation ____________________________________________________________________

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the

Factor of Nonsynergistic Extrinsic Motivation ...................................................

Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Synergistic
Extrinsic Motivation

98

99

99

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the

Factor of Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation ________________________________________________________

Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Problem Identiﬁcation ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Factor of Problem Identiﬁcation

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Preparation ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the Factor of Preparation
Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Response Generation _________

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the

Factor of Response Generation ___________________________________________________________________________

xii

100

100

101

102

102

103

103

Table 42:

Table 43:

Table 44:

Table 45:

Table 46:

Table 47:

Table 48:

Table 49:

Table 50:

Table 51:

Table 52:

Table 53:

Table 54:

Table 55:

Table 56:

Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Response Validation _____________________

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the Response Validation
Subscale of Overall Quality ................................................................................

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the Response Validation
Subscale of Originality ________________________________________________________________________________________

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the Response Validation
Subscale of Attention-getting Power __________________________________________________________________

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the Response Validation.
Subscale of Advertising Relevance ____________________________________________________________________

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the Response Validation
Subscale of Advertising Believability ________________________________________________________________

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the Response Validation
Subscale of Advertising Persuasiveness ____________________________________________________________

Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the full
Response Validation Scale __________________________________________________________________________________

Correlations of Variables

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

ANOVA Predicting Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation based on SNC ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

ANOVA Predicting Response Validation based on
Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation ________________________________________________________________________

ANOVA Predicting Preparation in the Creative Process based on
Social Norms for Creativity _______________________________________________________________________________

ANOVA Predicting Perceived Quality of Advertisements based on
Social Norms for Creativity ________________________________________________________________________________

ANOVA Predicting Perceived Originality of Advertisements based on
Social Norms for Creativity ________________________________________________________________________________

ANOVA Predicting Perceived Attention-getting Power

, of Advertisements based on Social Norms for Creativity ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Table 57:

Table 58:

ANOVA Predicting Perceived Relevance of Advertisements based on
Social Norms for Creativity ________________________________________________________________________________

ANOVA Predicting Perceived Believability of Advertisements based on
Social Norms for Creativity ________________________________________________________________________________

xiii

104

105

105

106

106

107

107

108

110

111

112

113

114

115

115

116

116

Table 59: ANOVA Predicting Perceived Persuasiveness of Advertisements

based on Social Norms for Creativity ________________________________________________________________ 117
Table 60: Standardized Estimates for Model Paths ............................................................. 121
Table 61: Comparison of Strength and Consensus Dimensions _________________________________________ 130
Table 62: Comparison of Strength and Conditionality Dimensions __________________________________ 131
Table 63: Comparison of Consensus and Conditionality Dimensions _______________________________ 131
Table 64: Summary of Theory for Three Dimensions of Social Norms ____________________________ 132

xiv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Componential Model of Creativity ......................................................................... 16
Figure 2: Detail of Componential Model of Creativity _________________________________________________________ 19
Figure 3: Systemic Model of the Creative Process ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 24
Figure 4: Theory of Reasoned Action .................................................................................... 39
Figure 5: Proposed Model of the Creative Process _______________________________________________________________ 51
Figure 6: Dimensions of Social Norms for Creativity __________________________________________________________ 66
Figure 7: Summary of Signiﬁcant Paths in Proposed Model ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 120
Figure 8: Structural Equation Model of the Creative Process ____________________________________________ 122

XV

KEY TO SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS

AAAA: American Association of Advertising Agencies ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Intrin Mot or IM: intrinsic motivation

NS Ext Mot or NSEM: nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
OCI: Organizational Culture Inventory ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Prep: preparation stage of the creative process: ...................................................
Problem ID or PID: problem-identiﬁcation stage of the creative process ,,,,,,,
Resp Gen or RG: response-generation stage of the creative process ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Resp Val: response validation _____________________________________________________________________________
SNC: social norms for creativity ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Syn Ext Mot or SEM: synergistic extrinsic motivation ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

TCI: Team Climate Inventory _____________________________________________________________________________

xvi

First Use
.................. 22
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 51
__________________ 37
________________ 110
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 51
___________________ 51

___________________ 51

43

................... 51

___________________ 31

85CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
Conceptual Framework

Creativity is an intrinsically motivated endeavor conducted in the face of strong
extrinsic inﬂuences (Amabile, 1996), but creativity in advertising, as it is commonly
practiced, is also a quest for fresh and distinctive ideas within the boundaries of an
organization, the advertising agency. Organizations are social systems of two or more
interrelated groups of people that work collectively to achieve speciﬁc goals through
programs of activities (Indik, 1968). Members rely on their organizations to counteract
the forces that undermine collaboration and to make the processes and output more
predictable (Scott, 1961).

Within each organization, social norms, brieﬂy deﬁned as group standards for
individual behavior, emerge to support and constrain the actions .of its members (Cialdini
& Trost, 1998). This social information is more inﬂuential in predicting attitudes about
work than individual needs (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978), and, according to the theory of
reasoned action, people use social norms to modify their intended behavior in ways that
are more socially acceptable (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). Advertising agencies have been
identiﬁed as organizations that exert social control over their members (Collins, 1998;
Norris, 1983). Hence, the subculture of creative professionals, deﬁned as the group of
people in advertising agencies who are directly involved with the creation of advertising,
such as art directors and copywriters, could be expected to adjust their expression of
ideas to ﬁt social norms for creativity, which is deﬁned as an organization’s formal and

informal standards for what is and is not creative.

Purpose
The purpose of this dissertation was to examine how social norms for creativity
affect the creative process in advertising from the subjective point of view of creative

professionals in advertising agencies.

Signiﬁcance of the Study

The study of social norms is important to the ﬁeld for three reasons. First, if
social scientists want to understand creativity in advertising fully, and if advertising
practitioners want to maximize creativity and its results, they need to consider the effect
that social norms have on the creative process from its beginning, because how a problem
is characterized or formulated determines how it is approached and solved (V olkema,
1997). Social norms have been called the “primary source of social order and
predictability. . .crucial to social life and a most important subject for sociological
inquiry” (Feld, 2002). Social norms are especially relevant to the creation of advertising,
because social norms have been shown generally to have their greatest inﬂuence when
circumstances are uncertain, when the source of the norms is similar to those on whom
the norms are imposed, and when those most affected by norms desire to maintain a close
relationship with the source (Cialdini & Trost, 1998). Social norms have also been
shown to be more inﬂuential in problem-solving tasks than in clerical tasks (Bateman,
Grifﬁn, & Rubinstein, 1987), and this ﬁnding applies to the creation of advertisements, as
the process is essentially ﬁnding a creative solution to a marketing problem. Such
solutions also are most likely to occur when highly creative individuals exclude “familiar,

reliable responses [social norms] and promote novel, surprising ones” (Stokes, 2006).

Second, advertising agencies tend to be more successful as they develop a clear
vision of what they represent, what they offer, and who they serve (T. Williams, 2005).
Hence, it is in an agency’s best interests to develop a strong set of social norms that is
communicated to every employee in the organization, as well to clients and prospective
clients. These social norms include expectations for all aspects of behavior, such as how
individuals from various departments should interact and how to work with clients; but,
as the creative product is exceptionally critical to advertising agencies, it is also expected
that agencies should have strong norms for creativity.

Third, this study of social norms is important, because these antecedents of
creativity, not to mention advertising creativity, have hardly been examined, as evidenced
by a review of the published literature and available dissertations. Within the
organizational literature, for example, no mention of social norms for creativity appeared
in a study of the empirical research on factors that inﬂuence individual creativity in the
workplace (Egan, 2005). A recent review of literature on social factors for creativity
(Madjar, 2005) reported how people within organizations inﬂuence creativity by
providing information and social support, but it failed to consider how people within
organizations limit the range of alternatives considered and affect the type of solutions
adopted.

The concept of social norms is also absent within the advertising academy. No
mention of normative inﬂuence or a similar construct was found in a recent review of the
existing state of knowledge about advertising creativity, its theoretical foundation, its
measurement, and methods for stimulation (see El-Murad & West, 2004). Only a few

studies begin to approach the subject of social norms for creativity, such as one that

investigates the subjectivity of perspectives that advertising people have, based on their
job or role in the creative process (Hirschman, 1989). Koslow, Sasser and Riordan (2003)
concluded that while both account and creative professionals attribute creativity to
strategy, originality and artistry, account managers tend to have the norm that advertising
is creative, if it is original and strategic; and creative professionals tend to believe that
advertising is creative, if it is original and artistic. Young (2000) explored the differences
between the attitudes of art directors and copywriters in the creation of television
commercials and reported that art directors valued originality and “attention-getting
power,” while writers thought the ability of the audience to relate to the ad, the
believability of the ad, and its power to persuade were more crucial.

Additionally, the research for this dissertation responded implicitly to a call for
investigation into group-level creativity (Kurtzberg & Amabile, 2000-2001 ), which asked
for greater understanding of how the presence of other people and their ideas affect
individual creativity, how ideas take shape in the social setting, and how environments,

norms and emotions within a team affect the creation and expression of ideas.

CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Creativity
Defmition and Approach

Etyrnologically, the origin of the word, creativity, stems from the Latin word,
creatus, and its past participle, creare, meaning “to make or produce” (Merriarn-Webster,
1988). Creativity is a general construct to describe the production of “work that is both
novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful)” (Stemberg & Lubart, 1999,
p. 3). Work is used here in the broadest sense of the word, for creative work can be as
abstract as creative thoughts or as concrete as creative behavior, performances, products,
or other means of expression (Taylor, 1988). Creativity is also said to occur when a
person produces a new variation that is generative or inﬂuential: generative, meaning that
a new product leads to additional new developments, and inﬂuential, meaning that a new
product changes the way people relate to the product category (Stokes, 2006).

Theories about creativity have been classiﬁed into those based on philosophy,
psychology, psychoanalysis, or domains (Piirto, 2004). Philosophers, such as Kant
(1976), Langer (1957) and Hofstadter (1985), sought to examine the deeper meanings of
creativity and its relation to the human spirit. Psychologists, such as Galton (1976),
Guilford (1950), Torrance (1974), MacKinnon (1962) and Tannenbaum (1983), sought to
understand the cognitive and affective processes to predict creative results.
Psychoanalysts, such as Freud (1976), Jung (1933), and Rank (1960), studied creativity to
understand the fundamental nature of human beings. And domain-speciﬁc theorists, such
as Poe (1846), Cannon (1945) and Koestler (1964) examined creativity inductively within

their ﬁeld to understand what makes certain people within it more creative than others.

Mooney (1963) stated that creativity can be approached in four ways: by studying
the environment that supports and inﬂuences the result (e. g., Csikszentrnihalyi, 1988), the
result or the end product itself (e. g., Beserner & O'Quin, 1986; White & Smith, 2001), the
process of creation (e.g., M. A. West, 2003), or people involved (e.g., John-Steiner, 2000).
Runco (2004) used a similar framework, ﬁrst proposed by Rhodes (1987), that divided
studies of creativity into those of people, product, process and press. While Rhode’s ﬁrst
three classiﬁcations are self-explanatory, “press” is short for “pressure,” which refers to
the external inﬂuences on creativity from “the relationship of human beings and their
environment” (Runco, 2004, p. 220).

The four approaches to creativity are fundamentally intertwined, but this
dissertation focuses primarily on creativity as a process and secondarily on the pressure
that affects the process. The process-based orientation is taken to discuss creativity as a
phenomenon with its various affects and effects, while the pressure-based orientation is
taken, because the process does not exist independently of its socio-cultural context
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1997).

This dissertation does not focus on creative people, because these individuals—
particularly those in advertising—already have been examined extensively to explore
what makes certain people more successful than others in the development of creative
ideas. For example, Gardner (1993) analyzed the creativity of Einstein, Picasso,
Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham and Gandhi. Rothenberg (1998) compared the creative genius
of advertising icons, Leo Burnett and William Bembach, while Buxton (1975) proﬁled

the working lives of creative advertising professionals and surveyed their attitudes.

This dissertation also does not focus directly on the creative product, because
such a focus leads to evaluations of which advertisements are more creative or to studies
that seek to explicate the effects of advertising. For example, White and Smith (2001)
used the Creative Product Semantic Scale (Besemer & O'Quin, 1986) to determine the
degree to which advertising professionals, students and the general public agreed in their
evaluations of advertising creativity. Murphy and Maynard (1996) compared the
decision-making criteria used by advertising agency professionals and clients to evaluate
creativity and other factors that affect their approval of advertising campaigns. Kovar,
Goldberg, and James (1995) studied the emotional reactions of consumers to compare

advertising creativity and effectiveness.

Creativity as an Internal Process

Creativity has been conceptualized most oﬁen as an intra-individual process
(Cropley, 1999) that people complete with a four-step sequence, which was formally
stated by Wallas (1926). The four steps are: preparation, where a problem is deﬁned and
preliminarily analyzed in the context of the knowledge, skills and experience of the
person undertaking the process; incubation, where the person takes a break from the
creative activity to allow unconscious associations to form; illumination, where the
person becomes consciously aware of a new idea; and veriﬁcation, where the idea is
evaluated and shaped based upon the creator’s experience in the relevant domain.

During the past 60 years, however, many researchers have questioned the validity
of the four-step model. Most tend to view the creative process as more dynamic,
integrated, complex, simultaneous, and recursive (Calwelti, Rappaport, & Wood, 1992;

Doyle, 1998; Eindhoven & Vinacke, 1952). Stokes (2006) ﬁnds the essence of the

process in deﬁning the structural space of the problem, acquiring knowledge about
existing conventional solutions, and exploring contradictory alternatives. Lubart, in an
extensive review of the four-step model, concluded that, while the four-step model
generally has served the study of creativity well, more work needs to be done “to specify
in much greater detail how the subprocesses can be sequenced to yield creative
productions” (Lubart, 2000-2001, p. 305). This dissertation answered this call by
investigating the relationship between the process and social norms, as mediated by

motivational orientation.

Motivational Orientation

In reaction to the behavior theorists in psychology, who generally classiﬁed the
causes of human actions into two categories (biological processes, such as hunger and
sleep, and extrinsic rewards and punishments), some researchers in the 20th Century saw
other explanations. Behavior also may originate from internal processes, which
Woodworth called “native equipment” (1918, p. 44). Years later, Koch (1956) noted two
affective states related to creative work that could not be explained by extrinsic
motivation—those forces, beyond interest in a task itself, that inﬂuence people to perform
a task. In State A, an individual can be “aesthetically desensitized” (p. 66) and “no
manipulation of extrinsic conditions. . .seems to improve matters much” (p.67); or in State
B, the person may by so committed to a task, that he or she becomes one with the task to
such a degree that performance is “self-regulated, self-determined, self-motivated, self-
energizing, and, unfortunately, self-liquidating” (p. 71). These states became the

foundation for the understanding of intrinsic motivation.

Deci (1975) traced the development of intrinsic motivation, noting deﬁciencies in
past approaches, and concluded that the best way to understand intrinsic motivation was
in terms of competence and self-determination. Competence is a person’s intrinsic need
“to deal effectively with his [or her] surroundings” (Deci, 1975, p. 55), and it is through
such competence that a person acquires a sense of self-determination or autonomy. De
Charms (1968) also supported the intrinsic need of self—determination by stating: “Man
strives to be a causal agent, to be the primary locus of causation for, or the origin of, his
behavior” (p. 269).

Initially, intrinsic motivation was viewed as independent from extrinsic
motivation (Sansone & Harackiewicz, 2000b). Deci (1975), however, demonstrated
many ways that extrinsic rewards affect intrinsic motivation, such as when people are
compensated for performance. Intrinsic motivation decreases, because people tend to
transfer the reasons for their success to external causes. For example, when people
receive compliments, they tend to attribute the reason for their interest in performing to
inﬂuencing others to like them. This interaction has received support from many
researchers, including Fisher (1978), who also found external constraints on performance
affected intrinsic motivation; and Daniel and Esser (1980), who found external rewards
reduced intrinsic motivation for hi gh-interest and low-structure tasks.

Other researchers have seen different interactions. Dermer (1975) reported a
ﬁnding that people high in intrinsic motivation were also high in extrinsic motivation due
to performance-contingent rewards. Philips and Lord (1980) and, later, Arnold (1985)
were not able to replicate Deci’s results in evaluations of the effect of monetary rewards

and competency information on intrinsic motivation. Arnold found, however, that task

performance was signiﬁcantly related to competence and attributions, which were in turn
signiﬁcantly related to measures of intrinsic motivation.

A sharp controversy surfaced in the mid-19908 when Eisenberger and Cameron
(1996) concluded that, on the basis of their research and a synthesis of the literature using
meta-analysis techniques, negative effects of extrinsic motivation are easily avoidable,
and positive effects on intrinsic motivation are easily produced using behavioral research
procedures. Other researchers criticized these conclusions as misinterpretations of the
data (Lepper, 1998) or over-simpliﬁcations (Sansone & Harackiewicz, 1998). Ryan and
Deci (2000) summarized another meta-analysis (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999) that
corrected the perceived errors in Eisenberger and Cameron’s research based on additional
studies. Their review concluded that rewards, which are contingent on engagement,
completion, and performance (either separately or in combination), undermine intrinsic
motivation; however, positive feedback generally enhances intrinsic motivation, when it
is given in a non-controlling manner that imparts useful information for the recipient.
Sansone and Harackiewicz (2000a) sought to resolve the conﬂict among researchers by
stating that the current consensus was that reward effects depend on the type of activity,

reward, feedback, context and source.

Work—related Motivational Orientation
The academic literature in regards to motivational orientation in work situations is
much more limited than research about motivation orientation in general, which typically
uses children or college students as subjects. In an analysis that was more descriptive
than empirical, Thomas (2000) traced the shiﬁ during the Twentieth Century from

extrinsic to intrinsic motivation in the American workplace. Extrinsic rewards, such as

10

salaries, bonuses, and beneﬁts, were more applicable when work was highly structured
and closely supervised. Thomas maintained that the recent work environment has
become more complex and diffuse, so employees are more self-reliant and supported to a
greater degree by their own intrinsic motivation. Florida (2002) echoes this paradigm
shiﬁ in the structure of the American workforce by claiming that the size and inﬂuence of
the “Creative Class,” those people who must think on their own, is now greater than the
size and inﬂuence of Working Class.

Thomas proposed a model of intrinsic motivation that combines Deci’s core
components of self-determination and competence with elements from a model by
Hackman and Oldham (1980). Hackman and Oldham’s model made intrinsic motivation
contingent on three psychological states (meaningfulness of work, responsibility for the
outcome, and knowledge of actual results) and ﬁve core job characteristics: skill variety,
comprehensiveness of the task, signiﬁcance of the task, autonomy and feedback from the
job itself (as opposed to feedback from supervisors). Thomas’ ﬁnal model also included
four exogenous variables that affect intrinsic motivation: committing to a meaningful
purpose, choosing the activities to accomplish the task, gaining a personal sense of
competence through one’s performance, and monitoring one’s progress toward the
purpose.

Recent empirical research (Luo, 1999) supports the notion that intrinsic
motivation is related to job satisfaction, while extrinsic motivation is related to
depression, which implies that extrinsic motivation is negatively related to intrinsic

motivation. Yperen and Hagedoom’s (2003) survey of 555 nurses found that high levels

11

of instrumental support increased intrinsic motivation. Instrumental support is support
that has a direct bearing on the completion of a task.

A totally different perspective on intrinsic motivation is that, while people may
have certain predisposition toward intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, their motivational
state may be affected at work by the socialization process and national culture. A
comparative study (Peterson & Ruiz-Quintanilla, 2003) contrasted American and
Japanese cultures, and its authors concluded that, while American culture supports
individualism and self determination, Japanese culture socializes people to think in terms
of the collective interest.

A meta-analysis (W iersma, 1992) narrowed the scope of studies on motivation
orientation to include only research that deﬁned extrinsic rewards as money, used adults
for subjects, and was conducted between 1971 and 1990 to coincide with the period of
the studies on the negative effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation.
Previously, studies of intrinsic motivation typically measured the amount of free time that
subjects were willing to spend on an experiment and their response to a reward as
evidence of an effect. Wiersma’s meta-analysis, however, only found support for the
negative effect of extrinsic motivation on intrinsic motivation in the free-time condition,
thus suggesting that the effect depends on how the independent variable is measured.
Wiersma stated that the variable of free time is not an appropriate measure of motivation
orientation for the workplace, because: 1) It is not externally valid if one extrapolates the
time spent in the laboratory to a day’s work; 2) Employees are paid for their work
regardless of their effort, so even during their “free time,” they are still being rewarded;

and 3) Free-time performance in the workplace may also be construed as working for

12

delayed gratiﬁcation. Wiersma called for additional research to “specify “the construct

of intrinsic motivation more clearly.” (1992, p. 112).

Motivation and Creativity

Intrinsic motivation has been viewed as fundamental for creativity to such an
extent that Arnabile (1996) formalized the relationship through the Intrinsic Motivation
Principle of Creativity: “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling
extrinsic motivationl is detrimental to creativity, but informational or enabling extrinsic
motivation2 can be conducive, particularly if initial levels of intrinsic motivation are
high” (Amabile, 1996, p. 119). This principle has been called “undisputed” (Hennessey,
2003, p. 183). Empirical support for this principle comes from 12 years of experimental,
non-experimental and theoretical research (Amabile, 1996) that links many general and
organizational social-environmental contingencies to creativity (Table 1). Five critical
detriments to creativity are expected rewards, expected evaluation, surveillance, limits of
time, and competition (Hennessy, 2003).

Researchers inside the ﬁeld of advertising have noticed the effects of motivation
on creativity to varying degrees. Reid, King, and DeLorme (1998) reported that top-level
creative people were exceedingly aware of the “oversight pressure” they received from

account management to produce better creative ideas. Sutherland, Duke and Abernathy

 

' Extrinsic motivating factors that control or undermine creativity are those such as win-
lose competitions, expected negative evaluations, and concern for rewards (Amabile,
1996)

2 Extrinsic motivational factors that enable creativity by providing information are those
such as establishing objectives, providing feedback, offering support, or giving
recognition (Amabile, 1996).

13

 

 

Type/valence Positive Negative
Automomy/sense of control Threatening critical evaluation
Sufﬁcient resources connoting incompetence
Importance/urgency in the work Expectation of critical evaluation
Optimal challenge Surveillance
Recognition/reward that conﬁrms Contracted-for reward connoting
competence control
General Reward that enables intrinsically Restricted choice/constraint
interesting work Arbitrary/unrealistic deadlines
Task matched to interests Competition with co-workers
Sufﬁcient task structure to
support competent
performance
Recognition that failure in work Lack of communication
can provide valuable Lack of cooperation
information Emphasis on the status quo
Mechanisms for considering new Emphasis on extrinsic motivators
ideas Win-lose competition within the
High-level encouragement organization
toward innovation Rigid procedures
Immediate supervisor Apathy toward project from
encouragement others in organization
Co-worker skill diversity
Co-worker openness to new ideas
Organizational Rigid status structures

 

Co-workers challenge ideas
constructively

Emphasis on intrinsic motivators

Competition with outside
organizations

Constructive work-focused
feedback

Clear strategic direction with
procedural autonomy

Cooperation

Collaboration

 

Table I: Socio-environmental Contingencies to Creativity

(Amabile, 1996)

14

(2004) explicated the types of information that creative teams consider to be “critical to
the creation of effective advertising” (p. 39). As opposed to Hennessey, West (1993)
found that senior creative directors at US. and Canadian advertising agencies believe
competition, deadlines and awards have a positive effect on creativity. Perhaps the
reason deadlines do not affect advertising creativity is because, as Burgess, Enzle and
Schmaltz (2004) suggest, subjects in experiments with deadlines negate the extrinsic
effect of a deadline by imposing their own time constraint, which thereby increases their
sense of self-determination (e. g., Deci, 1975). O’Connor, Willemain and MacLachlan
(1996) corroborated the beneﬁts of competition in producing more effective
advertisements, as did Vanden Bergh, Reid and Schorin (1983), who generally concluded
on the basis of an experiment that the more alternatives generated, the better the chances
of obtaining the “best creative idea” (p. 49). Ensor, Cottam, and Band (2001) reported
that advertising agencies in the United Kingdom were well organized to promote
creativity, as they generally lacked such extrinsic constraints as vertical hierarchies and
strong norms for conformity, while, at the same time, they were well supported with

resources, generally autonomous, and utilized a “no-blame culture” (p. 153).

A Motivation-based Approach to the Internal Creative Process
The componential theory of creativity (Amabile, 1983, 1996) places the process
of creativity in the context of motivation, and although it has some deﬁciencies that will
be discussed after the theory is explained, the theory provides a useﬁil framework for a
broader understanding. The theory is built upon three components that are “necessary
and sufﬁcient for creative production in any domain” (Amabile, 1996, p. 81): task

motivation, domain-relevant skills, and creativity-relevant skills (Figure 1).

15

4.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
 

 

 

 

1. Response
Problem 3. Validation
or 2. Response and 5.
Task ID Preparation Generation Communication Outcome
External Building up Search Test Attainment
stimulus and/or memory and response of goal End
reactivating immediate possibility (success)
OR —r-' store of environment against J 4’
relevant to generate factual OR
information response knowledge
and possibility and other No
response d criteria reasonable
algorithms 4 response End
possibility
generated
(failure)
OR
Some I Return
progress ‘ to l, 2,
toward goal 3’ or 4
Social
Environment learning
Task Domain- Creativity-
Motivation Relevant Relevant
Skrlls Skills
set-breaking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

increase or decrease

 

Figure 1: Componential Model of Creativity
(Amabile, 1996, p. 113)

16

 

 

Task motivation includes an individual’s baseline attitude toward the task, which
is directly related to the intrinsic aspect of motivation and to external factors that
comprise an individual’s extrinsic motivation. Domain-relevant skills are those abilities
that are pertinent to a particular endeavor, including all relevant knowledge, technical
skills and special talents that may contribute to creativity. Creativity-relevant skills
consist of: 1) cognitive abilities to understand and to solve the creative problem;

2) knowledge of heuristics, such as looking at the problem from opposing points of view
(for an example in advertising, see Blasko & Mokwa, 1986); and 3) conducive methods
and habits of work, such as the ability to concentrate, the persistence of effort, and the
willingness to work hard (Amabile, 1996). These three components facilitate the creative
process as individuals or small groups3 work through its ﬁve steps: problem or task
identiﬁcation, preparation, response generation, response validation and communication,
and outcome.

Problem or task identiﬁcation is the stimuli for creative action that may come
ﬁom within the individual or from external sources. Either the individual may have a
reason to engage in the creative process, or others may “identify a problem and present it
to the individual” (Amabile, 1996, p. 114). In the preparation step, the individual
conducts an internal search of memory and external search of available sources to acquire
relevant knowledge about the problem, including response algorithms from previous
experience in the domain. The response generation step consists of cognitively

processing information about the problem into new combinations, and success depends

 

3Amabile extended the componential theory of creativity to include small work groups,
along with individuals, as part of proposing a preliminary model of organizational
innovation (Amabile, 1988).

17

on an individual’s motivation and relevant creative skills. In the fourth step, response
validation and communication, domain-relevant skills are used evaluate the creative
solution for its appropriateness, and the idea is shared with others to be evaluated within
the context of the social system. The ﬁfth step or the outcome of the process determines
whether or not the creative idea is accepted, rejected, or revised through ﬁrrther iterations
of the process.

External inﬂuences in the social environment are shown to affect the process
through the individual’s motivation, and an extension of the model explains this effect in
detail (Figure 2). Motivation is actually comprised of three components: intrinsic
motivation, which is “any motivation that arises from the individual’s positive reaction to
the qualities of the task itself” (Amabile, 1996, p. 115); synergistic extrinsic motivation,
which is impetus for action that comes from external factors that “support one’s sense of
competence or enable one’s deeper involvement in the task itself” (Amabile, 1996,

p. 118); and nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation, which is the negative impetus for action
that comes from external factors perceived to be controlling or constraining.

Amabile provides a non—exhaustive list of social-environmental inﬂuences that
feed synergistic and nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation. Positive inﬂuences include the
importance of the task, the degree to which the organization rewards or recognizes
competence, and supervisory encouragement. Negative inﬂuences that support
nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation include critical evaluations, surveillance, internal
competition, unrealistic deadlines, and rigid procedures (Amabile, 1996, p. 120).

The componential theory of creativity was useful to this investigation, because it

deﬁnes the process explicitly and provides pathways for empirical testing. It modiﬁes the

18

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Problem Preparation —> Response a Response 0‘“me
identiﬁcation ‘F generation validation and
commumcatron
+
+

. . Non- Synergistic

Intrinsic synergistic extrinsic

motrvatron - extrinsic motivation

motivation
+ +
+

 

 

Social-environmental
factors supporting
autonomy,
competence or task

 

 

Social-environmental
factors
connoting control

 

 

 

 

Figure 2: Detail of Componential Model of Creativity
(Amabile, 1996, p. 119)

19

 

four-step model to include a new ﬁrst step of problem identiﬁcation, combines incubation
into preparation, transforms the nebulous third step of inspiration into a more empirical
step of response generation, expands the veriﬁcation step to include communicating the
idea to others (see the social perspective that follows below), and adds an outcome step
with contingent alternatives that allow for iterations and failure.

Empirical research using the model has been fairly consistent, as the basic
pathways from socio-environmental inﬂuences to task motivation to response generation
have been well supported by 12 years of study (Amabile, 1996). “There is a consistent
positive relationship between expressed interest in an activity and actual creativity of
performance” (Amabile, 1996, p. 171). Intrinsic motivation, rewards given when the
subject has no choice in participating, choices in how to perform a task, and watching
similar behavior in others (modeling) can all have positive effects (Amabile, 1996). On
the other hand, social-environmental inﬂuences—such as the expectation of evaluation,
contracting to perform a creative act for a reward, the presence of others, and the
motivational orientation toward extrinsic inﬂuence—tend to lower levels of creativity. It
should be added that although a later study found support for the main effects of the
model, no direct relationship was established between the social environment and
motivation and between the social environment and creativity (Hill, 1991; Hill, Amabile,
Coon, & Whitney, 1994, as cited in Amabile, 1996).

A criticism of the componential theory of creativity is that, while it includes the
inﬂuence of social forces, the theory is not truly social in its conceptualization (Rickards
& De Cook, 1999). There are no between-individual factors, such as the degree to which

group members collaborate or have the same perception of the operating social norms.

20

While the model is primarily individualistic in its scope, it includes the inﬂuence of the
domain and the social environment. The question to be addressed, however, is whether
or not the inﬂuence of the social environment on the process is only through motivation.

Could social factors inﬂuence the creative process in other ways?

Evidence of Individual-focused Creativity in Advertising

This individualistic perspective on creativity has been widely adopted by
advertising practitioners, who strive to maximize creativity, and by academic researchers,
who seek to explain its antecedents and consequences. For example, Gelade (1997)
analyzed the personalities of individuals in commercial design and found they were
substantially more neurotic, more open to experience, somewhat extraverted, and less
conscientious than average. Kovar (1995) looked for antecedents of creativity in
copywriters’ implicit theories of communication.

The classic model of advertising creativity is introspective in nature, and it is
based on the four-step process. Its origination usually has been attributed (e. g., Bengtson,
1982) to James Webb Young (1886-1973), an advertising copywriter and executive, who
spent the majority of his career at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency from 1912
to 1964 (The John W. Hartman Center, 2006). Young described the process as having
ﬁve distinct stages: ingestion, the gathering of information in a systematic manner;
digestion, thinking about the creative task and examining the gathered information to
develop tentative ideas; incubation, taking a break from the task, engaging in another
form of stimulating activity, while the subconscious mind continues to think about the
problem; inspiration, experiencing the conscious realization of the solution; and

veriﬁcation, where the rudimentary idea is subject to criticism and developed into its

21

practical application. Note that Young’s model also is quite similar to Amabile’s creative
process with ﬁve steps discussed previously: identiﬁcation, preparation, generation,
validation and outcome.

There are many other investigations of advertising creative process that focus on
the individual. Moriarty and Robbs (1999) describe how creative professionals in
advertising balance logic with irrationality, artistic freedom with constraints of the task,
and divergent thinking with convergent thinking. A practical creative technique
described by Cotzias (1996) is looking at an ordinary product from an extraordinary point
of view. This intra-personal perspective also forms the basis of an associative model of
advertising creativity, where the key element is the copywriter’s ability to “associate the
given facts into a functionally creative idea” (Reid & Rotfeld, 1976, p. 26). Framing
creativity in advertising as a process that resides within individuals is not limited to the
academic realm. Terence Poltrack, in an article published in AGENCY magazine, the
ofﬁcial publication of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), states:
“Despite the collaborative nature of ad creative—the art director/copywriter Sturm und
Drang (not to mention what happens later with an account executive)—it remains most

true to trace ideas back to individuals” (Poltrack, 1991, p. 28).

Creativity as a Social Process

This dissertation adopts the position that the creative process is best understood as
a social function, rather than as a personal one. According to Amabile (1982), creativity
is inherently determined by social, cultural, and historical factors, and it is impossible to
separate creativity from its milieu. Hennessey (2003) states that creativity does not occur

in a vacuum and that creative behavior only can be understood by considering the full

22

context in which people exist. Harrington (1990) deﬁnes social creativity as creativity
that affects others and argues that even the lonely ﬁction writer creates as part of an
ecological system: “Creativity does not ‘reside’ in any single cognitive or personality
process, does not occur at any single point in time, does not ‘happen’ at any particular
place, and is not the product of any single individual” (Harrington, 1990, p. 150).
Perhaps the clearest construction of creativity as a social process was advanced by
Csikszentrnihalyi (1988), who described creativity as the dynamic interaction between an
individual, the domain and the ﬁeld (Figure 3). An individual with his or her genetic
abilities and personal experiences takes useful information for the creative task from the
domain, which is a subset of culture that grounds the creative work within a speciﬁc
context. The product of an individual’s creative endeavor is then judged by a ﬁeld of
involved and concerned individuals, who act as gatekeepers to allow only the material
deemed as creative to pass into society. The successﬁrl creative expressions, be they art,
language, scientiﬁc advancements or consumer products, eventually move into the
domain and general culture, where they reside to affect ﬁrture iterations of the process.
An illustration of this social or systemic theory related to advertising is the
campaign for the National Fluid Milk Processor Board that was produced by the Bozell
advertising agency. The basis for the creative concept of a milk moustache came from
the domain of the common childhood experience of drinking milk. The Bozell creative
staff (a group of individuals) shaped the idea into a sports context by using well-know
athletes, such as Michael Jordan. The client (ﬁeld) deemed the idea to be creative and

selected it as the concept for the campaign. From there, the campaign became popular

23

 
 

Social system Culture

 

 

   
  
  

   
  
 

FIELD
Social organization
of the domain

Retains selected

  

DOMAIN
Symbol system

 

 

     

Transmits
structured
information
and action

Produces
variation
and change

PERSON

 

Genetic pool and

personal experiences

 

Figure 3 .' Systemic Model of the Creative Process
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1988)

24

    
  
   
   
 
  
 

enough to enter the general American culture (and the domain), where it was recycled
into new creative material by writers on several late-night television programs (Charnpa,
l995d)

The important contribution of this systemic theory of creativity is that it takes the
focus off the individual and moves it to a higher level, where nothing is outside of the
process. It is important to note that, as presented by Csikszentrnihalyi, the process moves
in a counter-clockwise direction from domain to individual to ﬁeld and back to the
domain; however, Csikszentrnihalyi also recognized that the ﬂow only represents the
main path of development. Other possibilities exist, such as when the ﬁeld stimulates
individuals to act or inﬂuences them in some way. For example, Csikszentmihalyi (1988)
noted that Florentine artists during the Renaissance were employed by Florentine
benefactors to produce great works of art, much in the same way as in advertising when
clients hire agencies to produce television commercials. In both cases, the presence of
normative values may be inferred in this relationship, because ultimately the artists and
the advertising professionals are creating products to satisfy the expectations of their
respective ﬁelds. While the systemic theory of Csikszentrnihalyi is useful in describing
creativity as a process that extends beyond the individual and allows for the inﬂuence of
social norms, it does not provide much detail on the speciﬁc manner in which various
factors inﬂuence creativity (Amabile, 1996), and it does not speciﬁcally delineate the

effect of social norms.

Evidence of Creativity in Advertising as a Social Process
Despite the dominance of creativity as an intra-personal process in advertising,

evidence of creativity as a social process can be inferred in studies of interactions

25

between agencies and clients (Holz, Ryans, & Shanklin, 1982) and between account
managers and creative teams (Tinkharn, Lane, & Leung, 1987; Vanden Bergh, Smith, &
Wicks, 1986). Vanden Bergh and Stuhlfaut (2006) used Csikszentrnihalyi’s systemic
model to show how a series of reports about the moment of creation, which were meant
to show the sources of individual inspiration, instead, revealed evidence of the social
creative process. Several studies (D. C. West, 1999; D. C. West & Ford, 2001) report
how people in advertising agencies assess and manage risk as part of the creative process.
Young (2000) implicitly recognizes the social aspect of creativity in an examination of
attitudinal differences within teams of copywriters and art directors. J ohar, Holbrook and
Stern (2001) analyzed the interactions within creative teams and concluded that teams,
which searched more widely for thematic approaches, were more successful in
developing the best creative concepts, as judged by a jury of advertising experts. Collins
(1998) constructed a multi-layered model of the creative process to explain the social

interactions between creative teams, agencies, and clients.

External Pressure on the Creative Process

After the creative process, the second aspect of creativity on which this
dissertation focuses is the pressure from the environment, and as advertising creativity is
conducted within the bounds of advertising-agency organizations, this discussion of
environmental pressure is limited to the organizational inﬂuences of structure, mission,
resources, climate, and culture that have been described as the key components of
organizations (M. A. West, 2003). The purpose of this section is to trace the pressure on

creativity through these key components to the speciﬁc external pressure of social norms.

26

Structure

Structure is the set of “enduring characteristics of an organization reﬂected by the
distribution of units and positions within the organization and their systematic
relationships to each other” (James & Jones, 1976). Flat organizational structures, those
that exhibit a lesser degree of hierarchy, tend to promote creativity, whereas
organizations that have higher amounts of specialization, formality, standardization, and
centralization inhibit creativity (Martins & Terblanche, 2003). The effects of rigid
structure have also been shown to impede the organization members’ attitudes toward
divergent thinking (S. D. Williams, 2004).

Wise (2003) proposed for a multi-dimensional model (Table 2) to explain the
differences in creativity between types of organizations, and it is valuable in
understanding the type of creativity in advertising. The model is a matrix that crosses
two dichotomous constructs: aesthetic versus technological creativity and creatively
centered creativity versus creatively enhanced organizations. Aesthetic creativity is
creativity that is judged on the basis of appearance or style. Technological creativity is
judged on the basis of its function, such as the manner in which the technology delivers
speed, efﬁcacy, or efﬁciency. Technological creativity includes the development of such
innovations as computer hardware and software, medical treatments, and
communications systems. Creatively centered organizations constantly develop new
products, whereas creatively enhanced organizations utilize the creative products of

others.

27

 

Technological Creativity

Technological Creativity

 

 

 

Centered Enhanced
Technical artists Artists
Aesthetic Compete in industries Compete in industries
Creativity requiring both technological requiring high levels of
and aesthetic creativity aesthetic creativity.
Centered Technology is used, but not
developed, by them
Examples: Video game and
electronic toy development Examples: Graphic design,
music composition
Inventors Distributors and
Compete in industries Adaptors
Aesthetic requiring technological Compete in industries involved
Creativity creativity. Reliant on aesthetic in the distribution of creative
ﬁrms to provide “personality” products and services
Enhanced for products and content for developed by other ﬁrms or, in

 

communication devices

Examples: Electronic
development, pharmaceutical
research

 

some instances, the adaptation
of relatively non-aesthetic or
non-technical products

Examples: Cable television
service, retailing, wholesaling,
travel, banking

 

Table 2: The Creative Imperative Model

(Wise, 2003)

28

 

The matrix produces descriptions of four types of organizations. The technical
artist type creates both technologically and aesthetically in a centered manner, and a
representative ﬁrm in this category is a video-game manufacturer. The inventor type
focuses on technological creativity and only uses aesthetic creativity to establish an
image or identity for their products. An example of an inventor-type organization would
be a pharmaceutical manufacturer. The third type, distributors and adaptors, enhances
the technological and aesthetic creativity of others to a greater or lesser degree.
Companies of this type are neither technological nor creative innovators, and examples of
this category would be banks, retailers and service providers. Finally, artist-type
organizations use the technology of other ﬁrms to produce products that are judged on the
basis of their aesthetic values. Examples of organizations in this category are greeting
card companies, toy manufacturers, and interior designers. The structure of artist
organizations is highly variable, from well-organized ﬁrms with specialized departments,
to less-deﬁned operations that specialize in customized creative products.

Advertising agencies ﬁt the description of structure for technological creativity-
enhanced, aesthetic creativity-centered organizations. While agencies commonly use
graphic arts, computer and communication technologies that have been developed by
other industries, they focus on the production of advertisements that convey novel,
relevant and valuable selling messages. Wise’s model is useful, because it establishes
aesthetic creativity, which is highly affected by subjective values or norms, at the center
of the advertising business.

Typically, advertising agencies are distinctly organized around ﬁve basic

ﬁrnctions: creative, account management, media, research, and operations (Engel,

29

Warshaw, Kinnear, & Reece, 2000). Origination of the creative product (advertising)
occurs within the creative department, which consists of copywriters and art directors,
who typically collaborate in teams of one copywriter and one art director to complete a
speciﬁc project (Hirschman, 1989). The use of teams by advertising agencies is
consistent with the way in which organizations generally approach creativity (Mohrman,
Cohen, & Mohrrnan, 1995), and there is extensive research on teams that work
collaboratively on creative endeavors (J ohar et a1., 2001; J ohn-Steiner, 2000; King &
Anderson, 1990).

The responsibilities of each creative team member are generally divided between
the copywriter, who typically focuses on the logic of the advertisement through the
writing of text, and the art director, who designs the advertisement’s visual appeal;
however, both team members contribute substantially to the overall concept and to each
other’s work. The development of this dyadic structure of copywriter-art director teams
has been attributed widely (Nixon, 2004; Wikipedia, 2006; C. E. Young, 2000) to
William Bembach (1911-1982), a leading advertising practitioner during the 19508 and
19605, who realized the beneﬁts of bringing together individuals from different creative
disciplines; but the team structure has also been attributed to Leo Burnett (1891-1971),
founder of the agency in Chicago, Illinois that bears his name (Rothenberg, 1998).

Each team typically works independently from other teams and is assigned to
speciﬁc and separate client accounts for at least two reasons: The team gains the
efﬁciency that comes from the familiarity of working continuously in one ﬁeld, and the
team develops a sense of proprietary control over the product have been shown to

increase creativity (Amabile, 1996).

30

Creative teams receive input from the client through an agency’s account
managers (Capon & Scammon, 1979). Leadership of the creative development is
provided by a creative director (D. C. West, 1993), who supervises the creative teams,
plays an important role in determining the overall strategy, and is the ﬁrst person
(primary gatekeeper) to evaluate the product in terms of its creativity. The creative
concept, however, is said to originate in the interaction of the team, but it is only deemed
to be creative after the creative director and other management supervisors give their

approval.

Mission

An organization’s mission and shared vision has been called the source of
creativity and innovation (Covey, 1993). Mission refers to the strategic goals of an
organization, and similarly, vision is a “valued outcome which represents a higher order
goal and a motivating force at wor ” (Anderson & West, 1998, p. 240). Vision is one of
the primary factors of the Team Climate Inventory (TCI), and it has four sub-scales:
clarity, commonality, attainability and value of the team’s objectives. The inﬂuence of
an organization’s goals on innovation was supported in a review of the literature by
Cummings and O’Connor (1978), who found that corporations encourage innovation by
measuring performance against objectives and by conducting opportunistic surveillance.
Mission also incorporates strategy, which is the general direction taken to achieve goals,
and which Martins and Terblanche (2003) identiﬁed as a detemrinant of organizational
culture. Advertising agencies use a mission and shared vision to direct employees toward
achieving goals and to gain new business (Leo Burnett Agency, 2006; Push, 2005), but a

qualitative study by Ensor, Cottam and Band (2001) found a disconnect between vision

31

and implementation, in that senior management of agencies generally think their
employees have only a slight understanding of the corporate vision, which they attribute
to rapid growth, structural change and changes in ownership. Agencies also differ in
their missions, depending whether or not management desires to position the ﬁrm as an
exceptionally creative organization, as one known for its strategic or business acumen, or

as one known for service.

Resources
Resources of organizations include funds, materials, facilities, and information
(Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996). While sufﬁcient resources have been
often identiﬁed as beneﬁcial for creativity (e.g., Coates & J arratt, 1994; Woodman,
Sawyer, & Grifﬁn, 1993), testing of the KEYS diagnostic survey that measures
organizational creativity showed that sufﬁcient resources were not important in

distinguishing between high- and low-level creative projects (Amabile, et al., 1996).

Climate

The literature on organizational climate is perhaps the richest in regards to the
inﬂuencers of creativity. Organizational climate is deﬁned as a set of perceptions that
individuals develOp about the organizational context to make sense of salient features,
events, and processes (Kozlowski & Hults, 1987). Two types of climate have been
shown to negatively inﬂuence creativity (Nijstad & Paulus, 2003): 1) climates that are
characterized as restrictive, critical and untrusting; and 2) climates that are characterized
as highly cohesive and harmonious. Climate that has been shown to positively inﬂuence

creativity is characterized as critical but accepting of new ideas.

32

At least four instruments have been developed to measure climate and the
correlations between its dimensions and creativity: KEYS (Amabile, et al., 1996); the
Creativity Climate Questionnaire, also known as the Situational Outlook Questionnaire
(Ekvall, 1996); the Team Climate Inventory (TCI) (Anderson & West, 1996); and the
Siegel Scale of Support for Innovation (Siegel & Kaemmerer, 1978). Mathisen and
Einarsen (2004) reviewed the instruments and concluded that only the KEYS and TCI
instruments were scientiﬁcally sound, properly documented, and peer-reviewed.

Similar constructs to organizational climate that have been found to support
creativity include a positive work atmosphere (Lapierre & Giroux, 2003); a high
absorptive capacity, which is an organization’s ability to recognize the value of new
information, assimilate it, and utilize it for productive ends (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990);
and Openness, which is an organization’s acceptance and integration of new ideas and
change (e. g., Dollinger, Urban, & J arnes, 2004; Johar etal., 2001; Martins & Terblanche,

2003; S. D. Williams, 2004).

Culture

Culture is the integrated pattern of collective human knowledge, beliefs, values
and social structures (Meniam-Webster, 1988). Culture also has been deﬁned as a
system of publicly and collectively accepted meanings that operate for a given group at a
given time, thus recognizing the situational nature of culture (Pettigrew, 1979).
Organizations are cauldrons in which coincident meaning is constantly created and
destroyed (Gray, Bougon, & Donnellon, 1985). The concept of culture has been applied
widely to the study of organizations through studies of the symbolic nature of various

elements, such as management, legends, stories, myths and ceremonies (Smircich, 1983).

33

The behavior of organizations can be better understood by examining its culture and the
“shared assumptions that people bring to their environment” (Wilkins, 1983, p. 24). A
person’s ﬁt within an organization’s culture and subculture has been shown to affect that
individual’s job satisfaction (Adkins & Caldwell, 2004).

Rosen (1985) used a banal annual breakfast event held by an advertising agency
to show the impact of cultural symbols on the conduct of its employees. Rosen
concluded that, in much the same way as people within advertising agencies seek to
inﬂuence audiences through the manipulation of advertising symbols, the symbolic
messages “encoded and enacted through the breakfast. . .inﬂuence the practice of the
members of Spiro and Associates themselves” (Rosen, 1985, p. 32).

Organizational culture also affects the creative process, as it establishes core
values, central themes, and the way in which the organization’s members view the
outside competitive environment (Hennessey, 2003). Martins and Terblanche (2003) also
conclude that organizational culture affects creativity, because members learn how to
behave and how business should function, which leads well into the following discussion

about social norms.

Social Norms
Definition
Social norms have been deﬁned generally in two ways. Either social norms are
thought to be moral imperatives of what people ought to do, regardless of the outcome, or

social norms are seen as behavioral patterns that create social expectations (Hechter &

34

Opp, 2001). In other words, the debate about social norms is whether rules cause
behavior, or whether behavior causes rules.

Ellickson (2001), on one hand, viewed social norms as rules that govern behavior
through social sanctions that reward compliance and punish deviance. Fine (2001), on
the other hand, took the opposite perspective of norms resulting from certain behaviors
that emerge through a socialization process. People, who actively create culture, create
norms for others to follow. “The student of social norms begins with the relation
between the social world and the cultural object, recognizing that norms exist in the
social space. To understand how norms emerge requires the incorporation of the cultural
creator as a normative entrepreneur” (Fine, 2001 , p. 142).

Another contrasting deﬁnition is that social norms are either arbitrary or
purposeful. Theorists, who come from an anthropological background, tend to see norms
as arbitrary and random rules for behavior that happen to be valued or reinforced by the
culture (Cialdini & Trost, 1998). In short, any behavior can become codiﬁed into a social
norm. On the other hand, other theorists argue that social norms have speciﬁc reasons to
exist, because they are tied to successful behaviors (Schaller & Latane, 1996). This
purposeful perspective suggests that those norms, which are no longer useful, will die out
with a change in generations.

Social norms also have been categorized as descriptive, injunctive or subjective
(Cialdini & Trost, 1998) and perceived or collective (Lapinski & Rimal, 2005).
Descriptive norms are based on observations of what other people do in a given situation.
The more that people respond in a similar manner, the more other people perceive the

behavior to be appropriate, and the more the behavior will be adopted (Thibaut & Kelley,

35

1959). Injunctive norms are rules for behavior, based on what should be done, such as
helping others (Batson, 1998). Subjective norms are what people believe they should do,
based upon their perception of what other people, who are important to them, want them
to do (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). Lapinski’s deﬁnition of perceived norms is virtually the
same as that for subjective norms, as perceived norms are those that operate at the
individual level; in contrast to collective norms, which serve as codes of conduct for a
society.

Consistent with the two alternative manners in which social norms are
characterized as either rules or behavior, social norms may be top-down processes, in
which case they tend to be formalized. On the other hand, social norms are examples of
shared-unit properties that emerge from the experiences, attitudes, perceptions, values,
cognitions and behaviors of group members. They become active within organizations as
members interact through processes of attraction, selection, attrition, socialization, and
leadership to form a collective and consensually-based aspect that reﬂects the whole

system (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000).

Dimensions

Social norms are typically described in the literature using three dimensions:
oughtness or strength, consensus, and conditionality.

Oughtness is the term used for the sense that there is an established standard for
behavior that members of the social system gm perform (Cialdini & Trost, 1998), and
oughtness is a common dimension in most deﬁnitions of social norms (Hechter & Opp,
2001). One instrument for the measurement of oughtness is the Norms Diagnostic Index

that has been developed to evaluate organizational norms for performance, job

36

involvement, training, leader-subordinate relations, policies, confrontation, and climate
(Allen & Dyer, 1980). Large variances have been found in the strength of social norms
depending on behavior. Norms for speaking and walking have a low degree of oughtness,
while norms for disciplining children produce strong concern and disagreement (Jackson,
1965). The social aspect of the oughtness construct is evident, as research has shown that
people tend to overestimate the prevalence of social norms for topics, such as drinking
(Maddock & Glanz, 2005), tobacco (Ott & Doyle, 2005), and health (Carnpo, Cameron,
Brossard, & Fraser, 2004).

For social norms to exist, the content of these norms must be shared with others
(Cialdini & Trost, 1998). This implies a measure of consensus: the degree to which the
members in the group all share the same norms, such as for the use of force by police
ofﬁcers (Langbein & J orstad, 2004) and for decision making in work groups
(Bettenhausen & Murnigham, 1985). The Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI)
measures consensus in regards to 12 different norms that describe an organization’s
culture: helpfulness, afﬁliation, approval, conventionality, dependency, avoidance,
confrontation, power, competition, competence, achievement and self-actualization
(Cooke & Rousseau, 1988).

Most norms are conditional (Hechter & Opp, 2001) in that while a norm generally
may be operant, there is a degree to which it may apply. For example, a physician may
promise to follow the norm of always telling the truth, but he or she may decide to
suspend the rule if a patient has cancer and telling that patient the truth would prompt the
patient to commit suicide (Opp, 2001). In an ethnographic examination of the culture of

people who pick wild mushrooms, Fine (2001) reported how norms for harvesting were

37

situational, dependent on the amount of competition, degree of association, social status,
experience, and physical space of the participants. Conditionality, however, does not
imply there are never unconditional situations. A norm, such as one requiring a man to
only be married to one woman, leaves no room for conditionality or ambiguity

(Kanazawa & Still, 2001).

Purposes of Social Norms

Social norms are used by people to achieve three goals: to make their actions
more effective, to build and maintain social relationships, and to manage their self image
(Cialdini & Trost, 1998). Which goal becomes operative depends on the salience of the
particular goal. Moderators of norms include the degree to which expectations of a
beneﬁcial outcome outweigh the cost of pursuing a behavior, the degree to which an
individual identiﬁes with his or her reference group, and the degree of ego involvement
(Lapinski & Rimal, 2005). Hence, social norms provide valuable beneﬁts not only to the

organization but also to the individual.

Inﬂuence of Social Norms

The construct of a social norm is the critical component in the theory of reasoned
action (Figure 4), which asserts that the tendency of a person to act in a particular manner
is determined by the person’s attitude toward the behavior and by that person’s
perception, called a subjective norm, about what signiﬁcant other people think in regard
to that person performing the action (Ajzen & F ishbein, 1980). Evidence that social
norms are very powerful inﬂuencers of behavior goes back to the classic experiment of

Asch (1951), who demonstrated how the opinions of others affected the judgments of

38

 

 

Beliefs that a
behavior will lead to
certain outcomes,
and the evaluations
of these outcomes

 

¢ Attitude toward

 

 

 

 

 

Beliefs about what
speciﬁc individuals
think the person
should or should not
perform the
behavior, and the
motivation to
comply with these
speciﬁc referents

 

 

the behavior

 

 

 

 

Relative
importance of
attitudinal and

normative
considerations

 

 

 

Intention

 

 

 

 

Behavior

 

 

 

 

 

Subjective norm

 

 

Figure 4: Theory of Reasoned Action
(Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980)

39

 

subjects who were asked to pick the longest of three lines. More recently, social norms
have been studied within the context of tax evasion (W enzel, 2004), library behavior
(Aarts, Dijksterhuis, & Custers, 2003), cross-gender ﬁiendships (Felmlee, 1999), and
tipping waiters at restaurants (Azar, 2005). The conclusion here is that the study of social

norms is important and continues as a strong interest of social scientists today.

Sanctions

People in organizations often adhere to social norms—because they intrinsically
believe the salient norms will help achieve a goal, build relationships with other people,
or maintain their self image (Cialdini & Trost, 1998)—but social norms are more likely
to be maintained by external sanctions (Home, 2001). These sanctions may be positive,
as in the bestowing of rewards for compliance, or they may be negative, as in the delivery
of punishment for deviant behavior (Coleman, 1990). Therefore, social norms for
creativity in advertising agencies can also be expected to be enforced through a system of
sanctions. Positive reinforcement could be given to the individual or creative team by
presenting their work to a client or by providing other rewards, such as bonuses, raises,
promotions, and important new assignments. Possible sanctions for not producing
advertising materials that meet norms for creativity could include a critical performance
review, not showing the ad to the client, removal from the account, a low or no salary
increase, and ultimately termination of employment. It is expected that that there will be
a positive relationship between the perception of the strength of social norms and an

enforcement system.

40

Social Norms and the Workplace

Social norms are speciﬁc to the situation and the people who interact within it
(Handel, 1979), and therefore, social norms are important to any study of the workplace.
Regulative or injunctive norms have been identiﬁed as common types of norms in work
situations (Therbom, 2002). Social information, including information about normative
values, comes ﬁom other people in the immediate work environment, such as co-workers
and supervisors (Grifﬁn, 1983). Social norms contribute to an enhancement of
productive behavior in the workplace (Langbein & J orstad, 2004), and to employees’
perceptions toward their work and their overall job satisfaction (O'Reilly & Caldwell,
1985). Not all social norms are beneﬁcial, however, as J ehn (1995) showed that norms
for openness in discussing conﬂict did not improve the work groups’ abilities to manage
disagreements constructively.

The inﬂuence of social norms in the workplace can be traced back to such famous
studies as the “Hawthorne Research” that showed the power of social relationships
among assembly workers at the Western Electric Company (Homans, 1941). Later, Roy
(1954) portrayed the positive side of social norms in a qualitative study of a machine
shop, where employees developed their own social norms to gain some sense of control
over their working conditions. More recently, Edmonson (1999) reported that social
norms for psychological safety were associated positively with learning; Edwards (2005)
called for more investigation into the social norm against discussing salaries at work; and
Jabs (2005) found that social norms for communication were important to organizational
decision making. Social norms for conformity operate through two mechanisms:

acceptance, which occurs when individuals adopt and express normative opinions, and

41

compliance, which occurs when individuals act without internal agreement (Sheldon,
1999). Social norms for competition have been viewed as restricting creativity (Amabile,
1996; Hennessey, 2000), but advertising agencies commonly view the use of competing
teams on an assignment to be positive, as competition increases the number of
alternatives and taps the competitive drive of creative individuals (D. C. West, 1993).
Social norms for conﬂict and the manner in which it is resolved have a signiﬁcant impact
on creativity (Drazin, Glynn and Kazanjian, 1999; Amabile, et al., 1996). Within agency
organizations, creative teams are at fundamental odds with account managers, as
copywriters and art directors value their work intrinsically for its artistic expression and
extrinsically for its career-advancement potential; as opposed to managers, who tend to
value advertising more for its strategic utility (V anden Bergh et al., 1986). Conﬂict is
also present inside agency teams, as writers tend to be more concerned about relevance,
believability, and persuasiveness than art directors, who tend to focus on visual style,

originality and attention-getting power of the advertisement (C. E. Young, 2000).

Social Norms for Creativity

In an ethnographic investigation of the culture inside creative departments of
British advertising agencies, Sean Nixon noted that “advertising has occupied an
important place within these diverse accounts of economic and cultural change and
represented a particularly visible marker of the dynamism of commercial society” (Nixon,
2004, p. 3). Nixon further noted that there was a signiﬁcant void in the literature, relative
to the culture of ﬁrms that create the advertising agents of inﬂuence, and he stated that
“opening up the informal cultures and subjective identities of advertising practitioners is

an indispensable part of an adequate account of the commercial practices performed by

42

advertising agencies.” (p. 5) This led Nixon to conclude that “the meanings, values and
normative assumptions written into their occupational cultures will be important in
mediating the process of reaching out to and connecting with consumers” (p. 5). Hence,

‘ there is a strong connection between social norms and creativity.

Deﬁnition

For what is thought to be the ﬁrst time in any known literature, social norms for
creativity (SNC) is deﬁned here as what people in groups or organizations believe is and
is not creative in relation to the group’s work or output. As norms, these socially
acceptable ideas about creativity shape the creative process from the very beginning.
They serve as pre-existing conditions or guideposts for what will be accepted or rejected
later by the ﬁeld, as it passes judgment on the product of the creative endeavor. Social
norms for creativity serve as goals for what creators want to achieve, and they serve as
standards against which creators monitor their own progress and the production of others
within the organization. Like other social norms, social norms for creativity are thought
to be highly situational and dependent on the collective values of people in an
organization. At the same time, social norms for creativity also respond to external
trends and fashions from the greater environment, such as the relevant and salient
expressions of creative behavior by other people in the industry.

There is no standard deﬁnition of social norms (Hechter and Opp, 2000), and
deﬁning social norms for creativity in advertising more speciﬁcally is even harder
because of their complexity. Social norms for creativity are much more difﬁcult to pin
down than other social norms. For example, to examine social norms for smoking,

researchers asked people about their perception of the rate of smoking among the

43

population and compared these perceptions to actual behavior (Ott & Doyle, 2005). The
social norm for smoking was simply the degree to which smoking was perceived
favorably. Social norms for creativity, however, are much more multi—dimensional and
conditional.

At the strategic level, a social norm for creativity in advertising may be that the
advertisement must be surprising, smart, or edgy. For example, the marketing
communication ﬁrm, Push, of Orlando, Florida, stated that its expectations of creativity
are that advertising should be unexpected, clear and fearless (Push, 2005). It may be that
the social system within an advertising agency’s creative department believes that good
advertising is more visually driven than copy driven, more emotional than logical. It may
be that advertising must be humorous or have some sort of visual pun. At a more tactical
level, social norms for creativity may include techniques, such as the style of layouts,
preferences for photos over illustrations, or favored typographical fonts. A normative
belief in an agency may be that jingles, simple songs used in radio commercials to
quickly communicate an advertising slogan or a brand name, are antiquated and therefore
not a norm for creativity.

For the purposes of this dissertation, however, social norms for creativity in
advertising shall be deﬁned as what those within the creative department perceive are the
common (jointly-held) values for what is and what is not creative. This deﬁnition is
limited to higher order standards, as opposed to including styles or techniques, because a
complete topology of social norms is beyond the scope and purpose of this dissertation.

Examples may include values, such as unexpected, surprising, smart, edgy, breakthrough;

but, operationally, the common values shall be speciﬁcally self-deﬁned by the
participants in the research, as will be explained in the methods section.

Note that the deﬁnition speciﬁes what is not creative, as well as what is creative.
This is intentional, because both conditions are necessary to cover the totality of the
social norms for creativity. An agency may have the norm that unexpectedness deﬁnes
what is creative; but the description would be incomplete, if it left out norms against
slice-of-life commercials (television advertisements that portray real-life experiences).

If advertising creativity is conﬁned to the individual level of analysis, what is
creative and what is not could be entirely idiosyncratic. A common expression in the
advertising industry is “I don’t know what is creative, but I can tell it, when I see it.” This
declaration may reinforce the novel component of creativity; but creativity in advertising
goes beyond idiosyncrasies. Advertising agencies are organizations, like any other, and
they are not immune to the social forces that shape the output of their creativity. In
keeping with the emergent nature of social norms, social norms for creativity are thought
to be primarily developed informally through the day-to-day interactions of people in the
creative department; however, social norms for creativity in advertising also may be
formally expressed through an agency brochure or Web site that states a creative
philosophy and presents the agency’s creative principles to prospective clients (e. g., Leo
Burnett Agency, 2006; Push, 2005).

From a literature review, perhaps the nearest that another author comes to
considering the construct of social norms for creativity, as deﬁned here, is in a
presentation about how creative results develop through the process of managing

constraints (Stokes, 2006). The assertion of the argument is that creators (artists,

45

architects, writers, fashion designers, musicians, advertising copywriters, and advertising
art directors) must be aware of the conventions in their ﬁeld (what is creative and what is
not), and then these individuals breakthrough those constraints by generating opposing
alternative concepts. For example, the artists, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso grew

up in a world where representational painting was the norm and they became masters of it;
however in their desire to reach higher levels of creativity, they broke the standard of
painting ﬁom one point of view. Braque and Picasso painted the objects they saw from
multiple points of view, and as a result, they led the Cubist movement that revolutionized
the way people looked at art (Stokes, 2006).

The paradox of social norms for creativity is that creators do not reject these
conventions; they accept them; because what is creative and what is not creative are
socially critical to success. When the two aspects of creativity, as both novel and
appropriate, are considered (Amabile, 1996), it is understandable how creativity can be
viewed as a bounded process affected by social norms. Social norms for creativity are
also useful, because people are generally most creative when they are given a high
creativity goal or standard to achieve (Shalley, 1991).

When discussing social norms for creativity, it is important not to confound the
concept with others. Ensor, Cottam, & Band (2001) studied factors in the agency work
environment and concluded that advertising agencies in the United Kingdom lacked
many extrinsic constraints and norms for conformity, which are typically found in other
business organizations. The lack of norms for conformity must not be confused with a
lack of norms for creativity, because the two constructs are quite different. While

agencies may not have social norms for conformity in terms of organizational behavior,

46

they are expected by this research to have strong social norms for creativity that deﬁne
the range of acceptable creativity in their production of advertising.

Another issue that has been discussed in the development of this dissertation is
whether or not social norms for creativity are supporting or controlling. This notion
appears in the componential model of creativity (Amabile, 1996), which categorizes
external socio-environmental factors into two groups: those that support autonomy,
competence or task involvement, and those that connote control. The position taken here
is that social norms for creativity are always limiting, in that they shape the process; but
they are not inherently positive or negative, supporting or controlling. For example, does
the social norm for creativity that advertising should be more emotional than logical
increase or decrease the number or quality of the response-generation stage of the
creative process? This research takes the position that the answer is neither, as the social

norm only will shape the process by altering the content of the alternatives produced.

Dimensions

As social norms, social norms for creativity can be measured by their level of
oughtness, consensus and ﬂexibility. Oughtness implies a measure of strength, and the
question can be asked to what degree to group members hold the values for what is and is
not creative. This paper argues that advertising agencies should be repositories of a
strong set of social norms. As advertising agencies are highly social organizations and
are motivated to have a consistent set of social norms for creativity (T. Williams, 2005),
it is expected that agencies will exhibit a high degree of consensus among fellow
employees, who will perceive that other share their values. Likewise, agencies may have

the global normative value that its creative product should be unexpected, but agencies

47

produce advertising for a wide variety of clients and products under diverse and dynamic
sets of conditions. Situations in advertising have been described differences in creative
strategy (Duncan, 2005), creative tactics (Beltrarnini & Blasko, 1986; Goldenberg,
Mazursky, & Solomon, 1999) and formats (Duncan, 2005; Moriarity, 1991). Therefore,
agencies are expected to have a high degree of ﬂexibility in regard to their use of social

norms for creativity.

Other Research

Typically, when social creativity researchers have mentioned social norms or
other factor in relationship to creativity, they do so in the context of examining the
orientation of an organization and the manner in which it fosters creative behavior among
its employees or members (e. g. Amabile, et a1 1996; Oldham and Cummings, 1996). The
question is: how can an organization promote more creativity? Typically, answers fall
into two categories: either those encouraging creativity by providing support, or those
presenting new information and knowledge to trigger new solutions (Madjar, 2005). The
more fundamental issue of understanding how individuals limit their alternatives by
deﬁning what is and isn’t creative is noticeably absent.

Creativity-based studies have shown evaluating ideas according to various
standards may occur as an integral part of the generative stage (Lubart, 2000-2001) or as
a distinct process after the initial concept has been conceived (Mumford, Lonergan, &
Scott, 2002). Post-evaluations have been shown to be split between innovative criteria,
such as originality (Runco & Basadur, 1990), and operative criteria, such as performance
(Cardinal & Hatﬁeld, 2000). While not speciﬁcally addressing social norms, Lonergan,

Scott and Mumford (2004) found that better revisions to less original advertising

48

campaigns were obtained when they evaluated with innovative criteria, and better
revisions to more original campaigns were obtained when they were evaluated with
operating criteria.

When research to date in the academy of advertising discusses interpretations of
what is or is not creativity, the conclusions are primarily contingent upon the functional
roles that people play in the process rather than upon social norms. Koslow, Sasser, and
Riodan (2003) determined that creativity was predictable based upon artistry and
originality, if the respondents were from creative departments, and based upon originality
and strategic value, if the respondents were from account management. This dichotomy
in viewpoints basically supported previous research by Hirschman (1989), who found
that account managers judge creativity pragrnatically, and creative professionals value
artistic expression. This research, however, attempts to move beyond structural roles as a

determinant of creativity by examining the fundamental nature of social norms.

Social Norms and Motivation

The salient and relevant question here is how social norms affect motivation.
Actually, this is bifurcated into two subsidiary questions: How do social norms affect
intrinsic motivation, a person’s desire to engage in an activity for its own sake? And how
do social norms affect extrinsic motivation, a person’s desire to engage in an activity for
reasons outside of the task itself?

Although Amabile (1996) never speciﬁcally addressed social norms in her
investigation of motivation and creativity, her research on socio-environrnental factors
supports two conclusions. First, social norms that “support one’s sense of competence or

enable one’s deeper involvement with the task itself” (p. 118) have a positive effect on

49

intrinsic motivation and promote creativity, while social norms that control the process
have a negative effect. Second, when the need for novelty is high, for example in the
problem identiﬁcation and response-generation stages of the creative process, social
norms will retard the process. On the other hand, when novelty is less important, such as
in the stages of preparation and response validation, social norms facilitate completing
the job in an appropriate manner (Amabile, 1996).

The link between social norms and motivation is strengthened by additional
research. In a cross-cultural study of employees in the United States, Japan and Hungary,
intrinsic motivation depended not only on personal qualities, but also on external social
norms of the national culture (Peterson & Ruiz-Quintanilla, 2003). Social norms have
also been found to be motivations for tax compliance in Australian citizens (Wenzel,
2005), sexual activity in Latina adolescents (Flores, Tschann, & Marin, 2002), fruit
consumption among African-American males (Moser, Green, Weber, & Doyle, 2005),

and sharing information among work groups (D. Burgess, 2005).

A Study of Social Norms for Creativity

This study examined the nature of social norms for creativity and their effect on
the creative process in advertising by testing a model (Figure 5), based upon the
componential model of creativity (Amabile, 1996).This test may have been the ﬁrst test
of the componential model in the advertising industry. The proposed model for this study
used the componential model’s ﬁve-step sequence to represent the creative process and to
show how the intrapersonal processes of task motivation and the external social effects
(limited in this study to social norms for creativity) affect the process. The ﬁve-steps of

the creative process in the componential model are used, rather than the steps in Young’s

50

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intrin Mot K1:
Problem ID
H5 + H10 + 5
H1 + 1
H3 + H7 + i
/ i
Preparation
/ H11 + E
4 a
SNC \ NS Ext M01: E
H12 + ' "'
Resp Gen
H8 + 5
H2 + i
H13 + i
Resp Val
H9 +
Syn Ext Mot

 

 

 

Figure 5 .° Model of the Creative Process with Social Norms for Creativity

Note: Dotted lines “indicate the steps in the creative process where large variations in the
sequence are possible,” and therefore, no predictions were made. (Amabile, 1996, p. 112).

51

advertising process model (ingestion, digestion, incubation, illumination and veriﬁcation),
because the componential model has been tested, and because the incubation and
illumination steps are readily explained by information and motivation processes in the
componential model (Amabile, 1996).

The proposed model is different from the original componential model, because
the social inﬂuences on intrapersonal motivation, that were split between supporting and
controlling factors in a detail of the model (Figure 2), have been combined into one factor:
social norms for creativity. This research takes the perspective, consistent with the
position advanced by Stokes (2006), that social norms are always controlling in that they,
by deﬁnition, restrict or limit the process, and that the inﬂuence is not an either-or effect.
In other words, rather than using the paradigm that social norms for creativity support _o_r
control the process, this study adopts the paradigm that social norms for creativity
support by controlling the process. In eliminating the supporting and controlling duality
of the social force, the new model also transfers the valence of the external social factor,
which is not inherently positive or negative, to the individual, who may react to them in a

positive or negative manner.

Hypotheses for the effects of sociﬂoms for creativity on motivgtion
It was expected that social norms for creativity would be viewed positively,
because they would be seen to providing direction to the creative task and enabling
deeper involvement (Amabile, 1996). Therefore:
H1: Social norms for creativity were predicted to have a positive

relationship with intrinsic motivation.

52

Further, in keeping with the positive effect of social norms:
H2: As social norms for creativity increase, synergistic extrinsic
motivation also was expected to increase.
This positive effect of social norms for creativity on synergistic extrinsic
motivation should also extend to intrinsic motivation. Therefore:
H3: As synergistic extrinsic motivation increase, intrinsic
motivation also was expected to increase.
As social norms for creativity were expected to be viewed positively, they should
reduce the impact of controlling inﬂuences. Therefore:
H4: As social norms for creativity increase, nonsynergistic
extrinsic motivation was predicted to decrease.
A decrease in nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation should have a positive effect on
intrinsic motivation.
H5: As nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation decreases, intrinsic
motivation should increase.
Hypotheses for the effects of motivation on the creative process
The effects of intrinsic motivation were predicted to be the same as established
with the componential model of creativity (Amabile, 1996). Therefore:
H6: As intrinsic motivation increases, the perceived ability to
identify the creative problem (Step 1) was predicted to
increase.
H7: As intrinsic motivation increases, the perceived ability to

generate responses (Step 3) was predicted to increase.

53

Similarly, the effects of synergistic extrinsic motivation were predicted to be the same as
in the componential model of creativity (Amabile, 1996). Therefore:
H8: As synergistic extrinsic motivation increases, the perceived
ability to be well prepared (Step 2) should increase.
H9: As synergistic extrinsic motivation increases, the perceived
ability to evaluate the creative alternatives (Step 4) should

increase.

Hypotheses for the effects of sociad norms for creativity on the creative process

A key difference in the proposed model is that it predicts social norms for
creativity will inﬂuence the creative process directly, rather that only through the three
intrapersonal moderators of motivation. Amabile (1996) reported mixed results as to
whether or not social norms had such a direct inﬂuence, and the original componential
model does not show any linkage. It should be noted, however, that Amabile stated as a
caveat that only direct and primary inﬂuences were portrayed in the model, but the
depicted paths are indicative of its focus on psychological motivation, which has been
criticized as a limitation of the componential model (Csikszentrnihalyi, 1984). To be
more complete and more socially oriented, the model also needs to show that social-
environmental forces, such as social norms for creativity, affect the ﬁve-step creative
process directly.

This change requires a multi-level model (Drazin, Glynn, & Kazanjian, 1999;
Woodman et al., 1993) to account for the collaborative creativity of individuals working
together within groups. The proposed model herein is a multi-level model, in that it

suggests social norms for creativity affect the process individually and through the social

54

interactions of group members. For simplicity’s sake, the proposed model only shows
one individual and the lines of inﬂuence. Assume that other individuals, who are
collaborating with the individual shown, also interact with the process in a similar
manner at the same time.

In this study, social norms for creativity were examined for their effect on the ﬁrst
four stages of the creative process. Examining the impact on the ﬁfth step of creative
outcomes would have required content analysis of an advertising agency’s output, which
is beyond the scope of this study. The ﬁrst step in the creative process of problem
identiﬁcation is most concerned with specifying or describing the situation or the need of
the advertising assignment. Social norms were expected to constrict the deﬁnition of the
problem. Therefore:

H10: As social norms for creativity increase, their perceived limits
on the deﬁnition of the problem should increase.

The second or preparation step of the creative process is concerned with, as
Amabile described it, reactivating relevant information from memory or acquiring new
information ﬁ'om outside sources (Amabile, 1996); or as Young described it, examining
the information, thinking about the task, and letting the subconscious mind mull over
possible solutions (J. W. Young, 1940). In relation to this study, social norms for
creativity were expected to direct or restrict the way creative professionals think about
the problem, and therefore:

H11: As social norms for creativity increase, their perceived effect

on preparation should increase.

55

Further, as social norms are limitations, they were expected to preclude certain avenues
of creativity in the development of advertising. Therefore:
H12: As social norms for creativity increase, the recalled number
of concepts generated should decrease.

As stated earlier, social norms for creativity are thought of as positive inﬂuences
that may assist in the evaluation of advertising during the response validation stage.
Social norms can provide standards or goals to achieve, and they can serve as guideposts
for what the ﬁeld may be expected to accept as what is and is not creative. Therefore:

H13a: As social norms for creativity increase, the perceived
overall quality of the advertising should also increase.

Creative professionals have been shown to evaluate advertising in similar but
different ways (Koslow et al., 2003). Both art directors and copywriters tend to think
advertising is creative, if it is original. Therefore:

H1 3b: As social norms for creativity increase, the perceived
originality of the ads should also increase.
Still, there are evaluative differences between the art and copy sides of the business. On
one hand, art directors tend to think advertising is creative, if it is original a_ng exhibits
attention-getting power. Therefore:
H13c: As social norms for creativity increase, the perceived
attention-getting power should also increase.
On the other hand, copywriters tended to think advertising is creative, if it is original, app
if it exhibits relevance, believability, and persuasive power. Therefore, the following

hypotheses were made:

56

H13d: As social norms for creativity increase, the perceived
relevance of the advertising should also increase.

Hl3e: As social norms for creativity increase, the perceived
believability of the advertising should also increase.

H13f: As social norms for creativity increase, the perceived

persuasive power of the advertising should also increase.

Delimitations

Social norms may be examined at more than one level (Drazin et al., 1999).
Much of the organization and creativity literature discusses social norms as collective-
level effects on an organization’s orientation or fundamental nature (e. g., Amabile, 1997;
Amabile et al., 1996; Coates & J arratt, 1994; Woodman et al., 1993). Focusing on social
norms for creativity at the collective level leads to an external orientation that examines
an organization’s creativity in terms of its ability to inﬂuence direction toward a goal.
The more an organization promotes a creative environment and encourages creative
thinking and behavior, the better and more creative its solutions will be in terms of
processes and output.

Social norms, however, also operate at the inter-subjective level, which is the
level of relationships “between two or more individuals that represents shared ﬂames of
reference” (Drazin et al., 1999, p. 292). Focusing on social norms for creativity at the

inter-subjective level leads to an internal orientation that is more relevant to examining

 

what is and is not an appropriate expression of creativity. At best, social norms may
direct and, at worst, may restrict creativity by altering the format and content of ideas,

which are presented to the greater group for further consideration. This dissertation

57

concentrates on this inter-subjective level of social norms, because it is more useful in
understanding the intra-organizational creative process relevant to advertising.

This study also was delimited by investigating creativity as a process that occurs
within the structure of an advertising agency organization with an established creative
department. This delimitation eliminated advertising produced by small entrepreneurial
advertising agencies where the predominant norms would tend to represent idiosyncratic
beliefs, rather than socially representative norms. This delimitation also eliminated
advertising that is produced internally within corporations, which may be important to
study in its own right; but these organizations are primarily focused on producing goods
and services, and investigations into creativity within corporate organizations are
typically at the collective level. By focusing on agencies with established creative
departments, this study is positioned within the mainstream of the advertising agency
business.

Social norms are part of the culture of an organization (Wilson, 1997), and
organizations have been shown to have not only a dominant culture but also a number of
subcultures, which are “a natural byproduct of the tendency of organizations toward
differentiation by level and function” (Cooke & Rousseau, 1988, p. 249). A subculture is
deﬁned as “ a subset of an organization’s members who interact regularly with each other,
identify themselves as a distinct group within the organization, share a set of problems,
and routinely take action on the basis of collective understandings unique to the group”
(Van Maanen & Barley). Advertising agencies can be described by a number of
subcultures (e. g., Hirschman, 1989; Vanden Bergh etal., 1986), and creative

departments certainly ﬁt the deﬁnition of a subculture (Rosen, 1985). Therefore, this

58

study was further delimited by its examination of social norms for creativity within the
conﬁnes and context of the subculture that exists within creative departments of
advertising agencies. This study would be short sighted, however, if it did not recognize
that advertising creativity exists in many areas of advertising agencies (El-Murad & West,
2004). Account managers may develop highly creative strategies; media planners and
buyers may develop and implement creative media strategies; and production

departments may add their creativity to the execution of approved advertisements.

This research chose to focus on social norms for creativity within the subculture
of creative departments for several reasons. First, creative departments, as the originator
of creative work, are the primary sources of social norms for creativity; and second,
because analyzing social norms for creativity at the inter-departmental level would only
lead to the study of well-established and extensively researched conﬂict between account
service and creative personnel (e. g., Kovar & Goldberg, 1995; Tinkham et al., 1987),
which is an expected result of organizational differentiation (Cooke & Rousseau, 1988).
The purpose of this research was to move beyond inter-departmental differences to
understand the ﬁrndamental nature of how social norms interact with the process of

creativity as and where it occurs within the subculture of creative departments.

Limitations and Assumptions
This study of social norms was limited by an ontological assumption in regard to
reality. Some authors have found a discrepancy between operating and perceived social
norms. This research, however, took the constructivist perspective (Guba & Lincoln,
1998) that assumes ontological relativism. Reality is socially determined with multiple

and conﬂicting interpretations that depend on the individuals and groups involved in its

59

construction. Jabs (2005) revealed four hidden communication rules, by analyzing
retrospective discourse of the investigation into the explosion of the Challenger space
shuttle, and concluded that greater awareness of norms for communication may improve
decision making. Berrey (1988) argued that social norms for language below the level of
awareness of corporate managers inﬂuenced their hiring practices. Lapinski and Rimal
(2005), as mentioned above, distinguish between perceived and collective norms, and
argue that perceived norms cannot be aggregated to obtain group-level data. Perceived
social norms have also been found to be incorrect interpretations of behavior that could
be altered through increased awareness (Ott & Doyle, 2005).

Creativity in advertising is a standard that is difﬁcult to achieve, and this study
also made the assumption that not all advertising is creative. Not all advertising meets
the criteria of novelty, usefulness and value (Amabile, 1996). Much of advertising is
purely functional, especially in the retail sector, as it typically only communicates the
availability or price of a product or service. Other advertising may be derivative, in that
creative ideas, formats, and even speciﬁc wording and illustrations have been
suggestively or expressly based on previous work. Other advertising may be strategically
appropriate but lacking in interest and imagination. For example, the created commercial
character, Mr. Whipple, convinced millions of people to buy Charmin bathroom tissues
for many years, because the tissues were “squeezably soft,” yet the advertising campaign
was widely criticized for its lack of creativity (see Sullivan, 2003). Still other
advertisements may attract high amounts of attention with arresting images and unusual

ideas, but they may not be viewed as creative, because these ads do not develop

60

meaningful connections with consumers (Steel, 1998), who are the equivalent to the ﬁeld,

as previously discussed in the systemic theory of creativity (Csikszentrnihalyi, 1988).

61

CHAPTER 3: METHODS

Research Design

This research took the naturalist position that the study of advertising creativity
could be best accomplished by studying professional practitioners in the ﬁeld, where
advertising creativity has been recognized to exist. Student samples have no credibility
in this regard. Further, an experimental study would not have been appropriate, because
it would have been artiﬁcial to ask a number of professionals to produce an ad for
evaluation outside of the social norms of their agency’s environment; and limits of time
for this dissertation precluded a longitudinal study. Therefore, this research used a cross-
sectional survey to achieve an exploratory understanding of social norms for creativity
within advertising agencies. The survey was conducted using the Internet as a rapid-
response, cost-efﬁcient, data-collection tool. The use of the Internet also made it easier
for respondents to complete the survey, because they could enter their answers

electronically and did not have to mail a reply.

Sample
The sampling frame was advertising agencies in the United States. This study
used a cluster sampling method (Babbie, 1998) of targeting art directors and copywriters
currently employed by these agencies. The total population of art directors and
copywriters is unknown. There are about 5,000 advertising agencies in the United States
(LexisNexis, 2006), and they were selected to be included in the sample using two
criteria. First, agencies were chosen if they were listed among the top 200 advertising

agencies for 2004, as published in a table in the Advertising Red Book, agency edition

62

(LexisNexis, 2006). These 200 agencies represent the bulk of the advertising business
with approximately $8.159 billion in total gross income (calculated from a table of the
top 200 agency brands, LexisNexis, 2006). These well-established agencies employ large
groups of art directors and copywriters, which could be expected to have social norms
and which could easily provide respondents for this research. Second, 400 additional
advertising agencies were chosen to be included in the sample, if they had billings
between $10 and $50 million, if their listing in the Red Book indicated the presence of a
creative department, usually through the listing of a creative director, and if an e-mail
address was provided for either a president or creative director. These smaller-sized
agencies were added to increase the total response to the survey and to promote the

diversity of the agency population.

Procedures

Creative directors at the selected agencies were contacted by mail, telephone or e-
mail (Appendix 1) to obtain their support for the study. They were asked to distribute a
message to their creative staff that provided the Internet address for the study and
encouraged the staff to participate. F ollow-up e-mails were sent approximately one week
later to creative directors of non-responsive agencies to increase response levels
(Appendix 1). No incentive was offered, other than providing participants with a copy of
the general results.

A pretest was conducted to a limited sample to expose potential problems in the
survey. The participants in the pretest were excluded from the ﬁll] study. The pretest
sought to uncover any problems with understanding the questions or difficulty in

completing the online questionnaire. No problems or difﬁculties were reported.

63

The returned responses were tabulated automatically using the Web Surveyor
computer software program on the resident computer server equipment in the Department
of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing’s ofﬁces at Michigan State University, and

the information was downloaded to the researcher’s computer for analysis.

Instrument
The survey instrument (Appendix 2) had three sections: 1) measures of social
norms for creativity (SNC) and their affect on the creative process; 2) measures of
intrinsic, nonsynergistic extrinsic, and synergistic extrinsic motivation; and 3)

demographic and contact information.

Subjective Measures
There were eight variables in this study that were measured with multi-item scales
to obtain an estimation of the constructs. The item numbers in the text below correspond

to the question numbers in the instrument.

Social Norms for Creativity (Independent Variable)

As social norms are situational and perceived, this variable was measured by
asking respondents three open-ended questions: what he or she thought most everyone in
the agency thinks represents creativity in advertising (1), what he or she thought most
everyone in the agency thinks does not represent creativity in advertising (8), and what he
or she thought most everyone in the agency thinks represents a creative layout (15). The
purpose of using these three sets of questions was to triangulate social norms and increase
the study’s reliability. Including a technique-driven deﬁnition (creative layout) to contrast

with the two primary value-driven deﬁnitions provided a check of the construct’s validity.

64

Each of the three deﬁnitions of social norms for creativity was measured by items
to gauge its dimensions: oughtness or strength (2, 9, l6), consensus (3, 5, 10, 12, l7, l9),
and conditionality (4, 11, 18). See Figure 6 on the next page. These constructs provided
three measures for social norms, which was expected to increase the reliability of the
study. All scales were seven-point, Likert-type measures with end points of “strongly do

not agree” and “strongly agree.”

Intrinsic Motivation (Moderating Variable)

Seven items (22a-g) measured respondents’ motivation to become involved in
tasks for their own self-worth. These items were taken from the Work Preference
Inventory (Amabile, Hill, Hennessey, & Tighe, 1994) and comprised a reduced set as the
result of a conﬁrmatory factor analysis in a study of motivation among creative
professionals in advertising (Stuhlfaut, 2006). The speciﬁc items were: having
opportunities for increasing knowledge and skill, being driven by curiosity, having outlet
for self-expression, success at work, enjoyment in solving difficult problems, tackling
new problems, solving complex problems, and having control over the result. The seven-
point, Likert-type scales for these items were anchored by the endpoints of “never true”
and “always true,” as used in a study by Amabile, et al., but the scale was changed from

the original four-point measure to be consistent with the other sections of the instrument.

Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation (Moderating Variable)
The construct of synergistic extrinsic motivation was measured by ﬁve items
(22h-l). They were speciﬁcally written to incorporate well-established positive social-

environmental inﬂuences on creativity: autonomy or a sense of control, clear strategic

65

 

 

Strength

 

 

 

Consensus

 

 

 

 

Y

Social Norms for Creativity

 

 

 

Conditionality

 

Figure 6: Dimensions of Social Norms for Creativity

66

 

direction, rewards that conﬁrm competence, tasks that match a person’s interests, and
receiving encouragement from an immediate superior (Amabile, 1996). All ﬁve items for
synergistic extrinsic motivation in this survey had seven-point, Likert-type scales with

“never true” and “always true” as the end points.

Nonsynergistic Extrinsic Motivation (Moderating Variable)

The construct of nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation was measured by ﬁve items
(22m-q). They were speciﬁcally written to incorporate well-established negative social-
environmental inﬂuences on creativity: critical evaluation, surveillance, arbitrary and
unrealistic deadlines, lack of cooperation, and rigid procedures (Amabile, 1996). All ﬁve
items for nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation in this survey had seven-point, Likert-type

scales with “never true” and “always true” as the end points.

Stages of the Creative Process (Dependent Variables)

A series of questions, repeated for each deﬁnition of social norms for creativity,
measured the perception of the effect of SNC at each stage of the creative process:
identiﬁcation (6a—c, 13a-c, 20a-c), preparation (6d-f, 13d-f, 20d-f), generation in terms of
number of concepts (7a, 14a, 21a), and evaluation in terms of the overall quality,
originality, attention-getting power, relevance, believability and persuasiveness of the
concepts (7b-g, 14b-g, 21b-g). Scales for all items were seven-point, Likert-type
measures with end points of “very little” to “quite a bit.” The “Not at all” category was
provided to give the respondents the opportunity to report a lack of inﬂuence and to

maintain proper balance in the scales.

67

Objective Measures

Seven variables comprised a set of objective measures that were obtained from
the participants: name of agency (23), gender (24), age (25), length of employment at
current agency (26), length of career in advertising agencies (27), creative position (28)
and agency size by number of employees (29). The name of the agency was needed so
the data from different participants within an agency could be averaged for organization-
level comparisons. The age, gender, and length-of-employment-at-the—current-agency
questions enabled the research to examine within-agency variations. The length-of-
employment-at-any-agency question allowed the research to discriminate between young
employees who just starting at an agency and older employees who have changed jobs
recently. The question on the creative background enables the research to discriminate
between copywriters and art directors, and to weed out any non-creative employees who
happen to respond to the survey.

The amount of capitalized billings for each agency was obtained from the Red

Book (LexusNexus, 2006).

68

 

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS

Analysis of Responses

The survey produced a total of 263 responses from 92 advertising agencies. Of
those responses, 243 were qualiﬁed as being ﬁom an identiﬁable art director or
copywriter, and these were accepted into the data base. Ten of the 263 responses were not
able to be attributed to a particular agency, and 10 were from people outside of the
creative department, such as account managers and coordinators; thus these two
categories of responses were rejected.

Table 3 categorizes the number of responses received. Forty agencies provided
one response each. The remaining 203 responses came from 52 agencies for a mean of
2.56 responses per agency. Twelve agencies provided ﬁve or more responses, and the

maximum number of responses ﬁ'om one agency was 21.

Table 3: Responses per Agency

Number Number
Of Responses of Agencies Percent
1 40 43.5
2 24 26.1
3 13 14.1
4 3 3.3
5 5 5.4
6 2 2.2
7 1 1 .1
10 1 1.1
12 1 1 .1
1 7 l 1 .1
21 1 1 .1

Table 4 on the next page shows the responses by category of agency and method
of contact. Forty-six of the Top 200 advertising agencies in the United States responded

to contacts by e-mail or letter, which equates to a 24.2% response rate. Similarly, letters

69

and e-mails were sent to 400 medium to small agencies, which also produced 46

responses but at a 13.8% response rate. E—mail produced more responses from both

groups of agencies, which is attributed to the ability of e-mail to reach the target sample

of creative directors more directly than traditional mail. A number of creative directors

also responded via e-mail and telephone to inform the researcher that they were

encouraging their staff to complete the survey.

Table 4: Agency Stimuli and Responses

 

 

 

Failed or

Category Stimuli Sent Returned Net Responses Percent
Top agencies Letter 82 1 81 1 1 13 .5

E-mail 118 109 35 32.1
Sub-total 200 10 190 46 24.2
Other agencies Letter 26 1 25 2 8.0

Email 374 66 308 44 14.3
Sub-total 400 67 333 46 13.8
Total 600 77 423 92 2 l .7

Descriptive Measures of the Sample

Gender

One-hundred-sixty men (66%) and 83 women (34%) responded to the survey. As

no population statistics exist, this split cannot be evaluated for its representativeness, but

the general consensus in the industry is that creative departments in advertising agencies

are predominantly composed of men.

70

Job Functions
The respondents were comprised of 77 art directors (32%), 124 copywriters
(51%), 41 creative directors (17%), and one person who could not be placed in any

category, because this person handled both art and copy responsibilities.

Age
Thirteen respondents (5.3%) placed themselves in the 18- to 24—year age category,
21 (8.6%) in the 25- to 29-year category, 46 (18.9%) in the 30- to 34-year category, 31
(12.8%) in the 35- to 39-year category, 44 (18.1%) in the 40- to 44-year category, 38
(15.6%) in the 45- to 49-year category, 33 (13.6%) in the 50- to 54-year category, 11
(4.5%) in the 55- to 59-year category, and 6 (2.5%) in the over-6O category. The mean

was in the 35- to 39-year category, and the mode was the 30- to 34-year category.

Term at Current Agency
Fifty-eight respondents (23.9%) had been at their current agency for more than 10
years. On the opposite end of the scale, 35 respondents (14.4%) had been at their current
agency less than one year. In between, 24 respondents (9.9%) had been at their agency
for at least one year, 32 (13.2%) for two years, 16 (6.6%) for three years, 12 (4.9%) for
four years, 19 (7.8%) for ﬁve years, 18 (7.4%) for 6 years, 11 (4.5%) for seven years, 14

(5.8%) for eight years, and four (1.6%) for nine years.

Length of Career in Advertising
This sample represented a substantial amount of experience, as 157 respondents
(64.6%) have been in advertising more than 10 years. Fourteen respondents (5.8%)

reported that they have been in advertising for nine years, 10 (4.1%) for eight years and

71

10 (4.1%) for 3 years, 9 (3.7%) for 2 years and 9 (3.7%) for six years, 8 (3.3%) for seven
years and 8 (3.3%) for 5 years, 7 (2.9%) for four years, 6 (2.5%) for one year, and 5

(2.1%) for less than one year.

Representativeness of the Responding Agencies

Agencies of all sizes were represented in the results (Table 5). Eighteen agencies
had between one and 20 employees, 25 agencies had between 21 and 50 employees, 17
agencies had between 51 and 100 employees, 16 agencies had between 101 and
200employees, and 16 agencies had 200 or more employees, as reported by the
respondents. When respondents from one agency reported a different number of
employees, the Red Book (LexisNexis, 2006) was consulted to resolve the categorization,
as it reports the number of employees for most agencies. The mean agency size was in

the 21-to-50 employee category, and the mode was in the 51-to-100 employee category.

Table 5: Represented Agencies by Number of Employees

Category Frequency Percent Cumulative Percent
1 — 20 employees 18 19.6 19.6
21 — 50 25 27.2 46.7
51 — 100 17 18.5 65.2
101 — 200 16 17.4 82.6
More than 200 16 17.4 100.0

The agencies included in the response group also displayed diversity in terms of
capitalized billings. Not all agencies report capitalized billings, but 68 out of the 92
agencies represented do, as shown in the Red Book, advertising agency edition
(LexisNexis, 2006). Capitalized billings for the 68 agencies ranged from $1 million to

$1.85 billion annually. The mean billings, as calculated with SPSS, were $175 million.

72

Independent Variable: Social Norms for Creativity
In this study, social norms for creativity were measured in two ways: qualitatively
through the respondents providing their own descriptions of what they thought the group
values were in terms of what is creative, what is not creative, and what shows creativity
in an advertising design or layout; and quantitatively through measuring the three
dimensions of strength, consensus and conditionality. Before analyzing the quantitative

results, this section will provide the qualitative results.

Qualitative Measures

What Is Creativity

The answers to the question, “What would most everyone in the creative
department say is the one quality an advertising concept needs to have to be called
creative?”, were organized in a post-hoc manner into 14 categories: originality, attraction,
substance, strategy, surprise, cleverness, relevance, persuasiveness, power, memorability,
reward, simplicity, humor, and craftsmanship (Table 6).

A third of the responses reﬂected originality. An analysis further divided this
group of statements into 4 very similar sub-categories: originality, uniqueness, innovation,
and newness. Participants used the words originality and unique most often to describe
the category. Similar expressions were: “never seen before,” and “man, I wish I’d come

,9 ‘6

up with that.” The unique category also included such expressions as: “different, out of

the box,” and “stand out from the crowd.” The innovation category contained answers,

99 66'

such as “innovative, 1nventive,” and “wow.”

73

Table 6: Qualities of Creativity in Advertising

 

 

 

 

 

 

Percent" Percent"
Qpa_h1y Mentions of Catggory Trﬂ of Total
Originality
Originality 39 47.6 16.0
Uniqueness 27 32.9 1 1.1
Newness 13 15.8 5.4
Innovation 3 3 .7 1 .2
100.0 82 33.7
Attractiveness
Commanding attention 20 57.1 8.2
Emotionally engaging 10 28.6 4.1
Intriguing 5 14.3 2.1
100.0 35 14.4
Substance 29 l 1.9
Strategic values 21 8.6
Surprise value 19 7.8
Cleverness
Cleverness 9 3.7
mginativeness 2 0.8
l 1 4.5
Relevance 10 4.1
Persuasiveness 9 3.7
Powerfulness 8 3.3
Memorability 5 2.1
Reward 4 1.6
Simplicity 4 1.6
Humorousness 3 1.3
Craftsmanship l .4
No answer 6 2.5
Total 243 100.0

*Percentages may not equal totals due to rounding.

74

The attraction category of responses (14.7% of the total) comprised those
statements that referred to getting the audience to notice the advertisement. “Attention-
getting” and “stopping power” were two often used words in the commanding sub-
category. Intrigue was a sub-category, as participants described creativity as
“captivating” or “a visual uniqueness that invites the viewer and reader in, stirs thought
or emotion, and engages the viewer or reader in an out of the ordinary way.” Ten
participants focused on the emotional aspect of creativity that engages the audience with
an emotional hook.

The third highest number of responses was in a substantive category (11.9%),
pointing out that a key component of advertising creativity is its content; that advertising
can not be art for art’s sake. Creativity in advertising, according to this group of

’9 ‘6

participants, needs to have “a big idea, a good story line,” and “a clear message.”
Perhaps the most compelling answer was provided by two participants, who stated that to
be creative, advertising needs to have “a human tru .”

Comments that reﬂected the strategic value of creativity comprised 8.6% of the
total responses, which reﬂected the business function of advertising. Creativity was said
to be “smart,” “targeted,” “tied back to the product,” insightful, and “meet all of the
client’s objectives.” Unexpectedness appeared in 7.8% of the deﬁnitions of creativity.
One responder wrote that advertising creativity “must surprise the recipient, cause them
to think of something in a new way, delight them, and engage them.”

Cleverness is deﬁned as wit, skill, quickness, resourcefulness, and ingenuity

(Merriam-Webster, 1988), and nine respondents (4.5%) speciﬁcally associated “clever”

75

with advertising creativity. “It should be a clever expression of copy and visual.”
Irnaginativeness was related construct that also was mentioned.

As stated in earlier in deﬁnitions of creativity, relevance or appropriateness is
virtually half of creativity. “Great brands don’t talk about themselves,” wrote one
respondent. A few respondents (4.1%) stated that creativity was viewed in their agencies
in terms of creating connections between products and the audience, and between the
product and the ad concept. Creativity in advertising was identiﬁed as “the ability to
connect with the target audience in a meaningful way” and “an instant connection
between product and the headline or visual.”

The descriptions of what most everyone in the creative department would say was
creative tended to be deﬁnitional, rather than normative, which could lessen the true
measure of social norms. Also, it appeared that some respondents may not have followed
directions and answered the question for themselves, instead of answering it in the
context of what other people in the department thought was creative. For example,
personal statements, such as “For my money, it isn’t creative unless it sells” and “I must
have a hook,” reduce the normative value of the answers.

Although social norms for creativity were examined quantitatively and are
reported in a subsequent section, a picture of the normative values of creativity appears
when these statements are examined qualitatively by agency. Four agencies had 10 or
more responses, which is a sufﬁcient number to analyze here (Table 7). Responses from
the Midwestern ofﬁce of a large multi-national agency indicated that the agency regards
originality as a strong normative value for creativity. Half of the respondents from the

agency stated that originality or uniqueness was what most people in the creative

76

Table 7: Categories of Responses from Four Agencies

 

What represents
What is creativity What is not creativity a creative layout
Category Number Cygory Number Catggrv Number

 

A Midwestern oﬂice of a large national agency (12 responses)

1. Originality 1. Unoriginality 5 1. Attractiveness

2. Attractiveness 2. Shallowness 4 2. Design qualities
3. Surprise 3. Unattractiveness 2 3. Originality

4. Strategic values 4. Overly rational 1 4. Strategic qualities

5. Memorability
6. Humorousness
7. Craftsmanship

p—ip—lp-dp—Ip—Ap—IQ

An independent agency widely recognized for creative excellence (10 responses)

1. Substantive values 3 1. Unorginality 5 1. Attractiveness

2. Originality 2 2. Shallowness 3 2. Originality

3. Strategic values 2 3. Unattractiveness 1 3. Design qualities
4. Powerfulness 2 4. Poor strategy 1 4. Strategic qualities
5. Surprise 1 5. Stray comment

A primarily business-to-business agency (1 7 responses)

1. Originality 5 1. Unoriginality 6 1. Attractiveness
2. Attractiveness 4 2. Shallowness 4 2. Design qualities
3. Strategic values 3 3. Unattractiveness 2 3. Originality

4. Cleverness 2 4. Lack of focus 2 4. Memorability

5. Substantive values 1 5. Poor techniques 2 5. Strategic qualities
6. Powerfulness 1 6. Irrelevant 1

7. Craftrnanship l

A Top 20 consumer agency (21 responses)

1. Originality 8 l. Unoriginality 6 1. Design qualities
2. Cleverness 4 2. Shallowness 6 2. Attractiveness
3. Strategic values 3 3. Overly rationale 4 3. Originality

4. Attractiveness 2 4. Unattractiveness 2 4. Substance

5. Surprise 2 5. Poor techniques 1

6. Persuasiveness 1 6. Poor strategy 1

7 Substantive values 1 7 Irrelevant 1

77

r—sv—‘p—twm

department thought was necessary for an advertisement to be creative. The other half of
the agencies respondents were split among 6 other constructs (attention value, surprise,
strategy, memorability, humor and craftsmanship).

Comments from another consumer agency, with more than $600 million in
billings and 1,000 employees, centered on originality (38%), cleverness (19%)—“an idea
so clever it stays in your head, even after you’ve moved on,” and strategic value (14%).
The remaining responses scattered between surprise, attractiveness, persuasiveness, and
substance.

Half of the responses from an independent Midwestern agency, widely recognized
for its creativity in consumer advertising, were in the categories of substance and power,
with expressions of creativity, such as: “an undeniably great idea,” “transcendent,” and
“it needs to unﬂinchingly examine the truth.” Other mentions included uniqueness,
surprise and strategic value.

Thirty percent of the responses from an agency that is predominantly a business-
to-business agency in the Midwest reﬂected originality as the key value for creativity,
with attractiveness second (24%), strategic value third (18%) and the rest divided

between cleverness, substance, power, and craftsmanship.

What Is Not Creative
The response to the question, “What would most everyone in the creative
department say is something that shows an ad is NOT creative?” were organized in a
post-hoe manner into 13 categories: unoriginality, Shallowness, unattractiveness, overly
rational, poorly focused, poor techniques, client-directed, poor strategy, poor

craftsmanship, irrelevant, unbelievable, no beneﬁt, and stray comments (Table 8). As

78

Table 8: What Is Not Creative in Advertising

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Percent Percent*
Quality Mentions of Category T@ of Tota_l
Unoriginality
Irnitativeness 3 7 3 5 .9 1 5 .2
Unoriginality 21 20.4 8.6
Expectedness 13 12.6 5.4
Cliches 12 1 1.7 4.9
Derivativeness 8 7.8 3.3
Commonness 7 6.8 2.9
Borrowed interest 5 4.8 2.1
100.0 103 42.4
Shallowness
No idea 20 54.1 8.2
Hackneyed, formulaic 1 O 27.0 4.1
Miscellaneous (trite) 7 18.9 2.0
100.0 37 15.2
Unattractive
Not provocative 12 57.1 4.9
Dull or boring 9 14.3 3.7
Uninspiring 5 28.6 2. 1
100.0 26 14.4
Overly rational
Straight-forward 14 73.7 5.8
Miscellaneous (hard sell) 5 26.3 2.1
100.0 19 7.8
Poorly focused 14 5.8
Poor techniques 9 3 .7
Client directed 9 3.7
Not strategic 8 3.3
Poor craftsmanship 8 3.3
Irrelevant 6 2.5
Unbelievable 2 0.8
No beneﬁt 1 0.4
Stray comment 1 0.4
Total 243 100.0

*Percentages may not equal totals due to rounding.

79

opposed to the previous comments about “what is creative,” comments about what is not
creative tended to be less deﬁnitional and more reﬂective of personal and social values.

The 103 responses in the unoriginality category (42.4% of the total responses)
comprised seven overlapping sub-categories that are distinguished here only to be
intentionally and explicitly descriptive. Twenty-one literal responses (20.4%), such as:
“unoriginal,” “blatant lack of originality,” and “not original,” created the name for the
category. The most responses in this category (35.9% of the responses in this category),
however, contained a variation of the phrase: “been done before.” Other variations were
“expected” (12.6%), “cliches” (11.7%), “derivative” (7.8%),”common” or “ordinary”
(6.8%), and “borrowed interest” (4.8%). “Borrowed interest” is a phrase that is often
used by creative professionals in advertising to describe advertisements that heavily
depend on other and often unrelated content, expressions and symbols to draw attention
to a product. An example would be the use of sexual imagery to sell automobiles.

One common criticism of advertising is its Shallowness or lack of an idea.

Respondents afﬁrmed this opinion with 20 statements (15.2%), such as: “no idea

9" 6‘ 9’ ‘6

conveyed, no thought behind the execution, pretty visuals with no concept,” and “an
ad without an idea at its core.” Other related responses in this category were those
statements that criticized worn (“hackneyed”), mechanical (“formulaic”), or insigniﬁcant
(“trite”) advertisements.

Another ample category of responses (14.4%) were those statements that
coalesced around unattractiveness. Participants wrote that advertisements were not

creative when ads were “dull,” “boring,” “forgettable,” “ﬂat-footed,” “conservative,”

“uninspiring” and “not eye-catching.”

80

Overly rational approaches were also derided. A number of respondents (7.8%)
did not like ad that were “straight-forward,” or “without any unexpected twist.” This
category included statements that criticized ads for strictly focusing on product beneﬁts,
“following the rules,” and using “hard-sell” or “direct-sales” tactics.

Creative professionals condemned uncreative advertising in a number of other

99 ‘6

ways. Poor advertisements lacked focus (“too many messages, excessively busy,” and

99 ‘6

“cluttered”), reﬂected client direction (“copied the brief verbatim, exactly what the
client asks for,” and “expresses the client’s wishes instead of the audience’s desires”), did
not appear to achieve a goal (“off strategy,” “weak thinking,” and “doesn’t solve a
client’s problem”), lacked a beneﬁt (“ﬂat, feature oriented”), were unbelievable (“images
or text that shout exaggerated claims”), and showed irrelevance (“whackiness,” “trendy,”
“faddish,” and “self-indulgent.”

Social norms for creativity in advertising were especially evident in one category
comprised of certain techniques that seem to be out of favor with creative professionals.
The respondents to the survey criticized the use of puns (the humorous use of words to
suggest multiple meanings), celebrity endorsements, large type, and stock photos (the use
of existing photographs ﬁom commercial sources).

The four agencies analyzed previously for values of creativity can also be
examined as to their responses for what does not represent creativity in advertising. Nine
out of the 12 responses from a Midwestern ofﬁce of a national agency fell into the

unoriginality and Shallowness categories, as did 8 out of 10 responses for the independent

Midwestern agency, 10 out of 17 responses from a business-to-business agency, and 12

81

out of 21 responses from a large consumer agency. This data suggests that consensus

among creative professional in agencies is fairly strong ﬁom a qualitative perspective.

What Is Creativity in Layouts

The term, layout, is used by people in advertising as a term for the design or
format of an advertisement. Asking creative professionals about the qualities needed to
show creativity in an advertising layout examined the construct in a more practical and
speciﬁc manner, because judgments about creativity in layouts can be more concrete than
judgments about what is or is not creative in general. A post-hoc analysis of the
comments received separated them into 9 categories (Table 9): attractiveness (37.4% of
the total), design qualities (29.2%), originality (12.3%), strategic qualities (4.5%),
substantive qualities (4.5%), unexpectedness (2.5%), memorability (1.6%), relevance
(1.2), and stray answers (6.6%).

The attractiveness category is comprised of statements about a layout’s value in
causing people to notice an advertisement. These statements were divided in a post-hoc
manner into eight sub—categories that contained identical or similar phrases but did not
necessarily describe orthogonal meanings. The two largest clusters were those with
statements that expressed a layout’s need to “grab attention,” or generate “stopping
power.” Two other similar groups consisted of statements concerning a layout’s “eye-
catching” and “visually stimulating” qualities. Layouts also were seen to be attractive if
they “stand out from the clutter,” have “impact,” or are “interesting,” and “intriguing.”

The second largest category of comments expressed the participants’

requirements of a layout in terms of its design qualities. Most respondents in this

category (25.4%) said that a layout needs to be simple. Other respondents (19.7%) said

82

Table 9: What Makes a Layout Creative

 

 

 

 

 

 

Percent" Percent*
Quality Mentions of Catggory Totll of Totr_r_l_
Attractiveness
Grabs attention 27 29.8 11.1
Stopping power 25 27.4 10.3
Eye-catching 1 1 12. 1 4.5
Visually striking, etc. 9 9.9 3.7
Interesting, engaging 8 8.8 3.3
Standing out 5 5.5 2.1
Irnpactful 5 5.5 2.1
Presence 1 1 .1 0.4
100.0 91 37.4
Design qualities
Simplicity 18 25.4 7.4
Craftsmanship l 4 l 9. 7 5 . 8
Synergy of copy and art 13 18.3 5.4
Cleanliness and clarity 10 14.1 4.1
Image qualities 9 12.7 3.7
Techniques 7 9.9 2.9
100.0 71 29.2
Originality
Originality 15 50.0 6.2
Uniqueness 5 1 6.7 2. 1
Breakthrough qualities 5 16.7 2.1
Freshness 4 13.3 1 .6
Unusualness 1 3.3 0.4
100.0 30 12.3
Strategic qualities 11 4.5
Substance qualities 11 4.5
Unexpectedness 6 2.5
Memorability 4 1.6
Relevance 3 1.2
Stray answers 16 6.6
Total 243 100.0

*Percentages may not equal totals due to rounding.

83

or implied that a layout needs to exhibit craftsmanship. Layouts should be “precisely art
directed,” “sophisticated,” and “executed with the proper budget for photography and
illustration.” Still others (18.3%) looked for the synergy between copy and graphic
elements: “The headline and visual [should] work together as one” and “An ad will not
be understood if either the headline or the visual is taken away. The two must work
together.” The remaining comments in the design category noted the need for appealing
images (12.7%); clean design, which usually means that an ad only contains the essential
elements necessary in a well-organized, artistic manner (14.1%); and techniques (9.9%),
such as: color photography, the use of color, typography, sparse copy, and image
placement.

Comments expressing the need for originality comprised 12.3% of the total
statements about creativity in layouts. Half of the comments were literal expressions of
the construct. Other descriptions were: “unique,” “fresh,” “unusual,” and an often-used
term in advertising—“breakthrough,” which is a colloquial expression for a new or
revolutionary idea that rises above the general clutter or that ignores conventions.

A small number of respondents (4.5%) mentioned that the layout should ﬁt with
the strategic direction of the advertising. “It needs to make an immediate connection to
its intended audience.” It needs to “show a hierarchy of information.” It needs to be “an
innovative solution to the advertising problem.” Another minor group of responses
(4.5%) reﬂected a concern about substance. Layouts “need to be based on an idea.”

They need to be “concept-driven, rather than format-driven.”

84

The remaining categories of comments about creativity in layouts consisted of a
few expressing the need for unexpectedness (2.5%), memorability (1.6%) and relevance
(1.2%).

An analysis of the responses for four agencies that produced ten or more
responses seemed to indicate a degree of consensus about creativity in layouts (Table 6).
Half of the responses from an independent agency, a Midwestern ofﬁce of a national
agency, and a business-to-business agency were in the attractiveness category. A third of
the responses from the large consumer agency, mentioned in the previous sections, also
fell into the attractiveness category; however more responses for this agency (42.9%)

related to design qualities.

Quantitative measures

Social norms were also measured quantitatively by this study along three
dimensions: strength, consensus and conditionality. The data from these dimensions
were combined to produce a second-level factor: social norms for creativity, which

served as the independent variable in the study.

Strength
Questions 2, 9 and 16 asked participants how strongly they thought others in their

99 66

department believed in the quality that participants named for “what is creative, what is
not creative,” and “what shows creativity in a layout.” The means and standard
deviations are reported in Table 10 on the next page, and they indicate that participants
thought that others moderately agreed with their deﬁnitions, which is interpreted as a

moderate show of strength for social norms for creativity.

85

Table 10: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Strength by Individual

 

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
2 5.47 1 .56 243
9 5.81 1 .5 1 243
16 5.72 1 .44 243
Summary 5.67 1 .50 243

When the 243 individuals in the sample were grouped into the 92 agencies, the following

means were calculated:

Table 1]: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Strength by Agency

 

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
2 5.65 l .20 92
9 5.83 l .24 92
16 5.74 1 .20 92
Summary 5.74 1 .21 92

When the responses ﬁom 40 agencies, which only had one response per agency, were

eliminated, the following means were calculated:

Table 12: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Strength using
Participants in Agencies with Multiple Responses

 

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
2 5.38 1 .59 203
9 5.81 1 .49 203
16 5.73 1 .40 203
Summary 5.64 1 .49 203

Thus, the strength of social norms appears to be moderately strong, despite the
considerable standard deviations. This effect held up, no matter whether or not the data

is organized by individual, agency, or agencies with multiple responses. Tests for

86

validity and reliability of the three items were conducted (11 = 243). All item-total
correlations for each of the three items were greater than .7 (Q2 = .783, p < .01; Q9

= .771, p < .01; and Q16 = .770, p < .01); and all items were kept for factor analysis. A
conﬁrmatory factor analysis was conducted that produced at mean correlation within the
cluster of .40, an eigenvalue of 1.2044 and a RMSE of .01. A reliability analysis for

internal consistency produced a standard item alpha of .67.

Table 13: Observed Factor Matrix for Strength

016 02 09 F EV

 

oust .00 .00 ' .66 [.4356

Q2 .41 .01 l .62 .3844

Q9 , .41 .39 ' .62 [.3844
Consensus

Questions 3, 10 and 17 asked participants to estimate the degree to which other
people in the department shared the speciﬁed value of what is creative, not creative, or
what is creative in a layout. This line of questioning was supported by follow-up
questions (5, 12 and 19) that asked participants to estimate the degree to which they
agreed with most everyone in the creative department in regard to the speciﬁed qualities.
Together, these two series of questions provided a measure of consensus or agreement,
which would indicate the presence of social norms for creativity. Analysis of the six

items provided the following means and standard deviations in Table 14 on the next page.

87

Table 14: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Consensus by Individual

 

 

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)

3 5.15 1.48 243

10 5.70 1.39 243

17 5.59 1.39 243

5 5.57 1.67 243

12 5.96 1.48 243

19 5 .73 1.53 E
Summary 5.61 1.49 243

Analyzing the data about consensus by agency produced the following results:

Table 15: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Consensus by Agency

 

 

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)

3 5.20 1.22 92

10 5.80 1.13 92

17 5.61 1.16 92

5 5.78 1.19 92

12 6.06 1.10 92

19 5.83 1.21 9;
Summary 5.71 1.17 92

When the responses from 40 agencies, which only had one response per agency, were

eliminated, the following means were calculated:

Table 16: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Consensus using
Participants in Agencies with Multiple Responses

 

 

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)

3 5.1 1 1.48 203

10 5.67 1.39 203

17 5.58 1.35 203

5 5.49 1.70 203

12 5.94 1.49 203

19 5.71 1 .52 203
Summary 5.58 1 .49 203

88

Thus, the consensus of social norms appears to be moderately strong, despite the
considerable standard deviations. This effect appeared no matter whether or not the data
is organized by individual, agency, or agencies with multiple responses. All item-total

correlations for each of the three items were greater than .7 (Q3 = .742, p < .01; Q5

.758,p < .01; Q10 = .757,p < .01; Q12 = .819,p < .01; Q17 = .735,p < .01; and Q16

.776, p < .01); therefore, all items were kept for factor analysis.

While a uniﬁed factor for consensus was expected, a one-factor solution was
rejected because more error was found than would have been expected by chance (RMSE
= .0870). A two-factor solution, however, produced two components, now identiﬁed as

Consensus of Others and Agreement, as shown:

Table 1 7: Observed Factor Matrix for Consensus

F1: Consensus of Others F2: Agreement
Q10 Q17 Q3 Q12 Q19 Q5 F1 F2 EVl EV2
()4

 

 

 

 

 

Q10 .00 .00 -.06 .09 . .75 .5625

Q17 .53 .00 .12 -.16 .11 .71 .4096

Q3 .48 .45 .07 .04 -.22 .64 .5041

Q12 .61 .58 .52 .00 .00 i .86 .7396
Q19 .51 .49 .44 , .62 .00 l .72 .5184
Q5 .46 .44 .40 i .56 .47 ‘ .65 .4225
F1 ’ ; .95 1.4762

F2 1 .95 é 1.6805
Mean correlations .49 .55

Standard item alpha .74 .79

RMSE .00 .00

A separate test for parallelism between the two factors produced four of nine
cases where the observed error exceeded the .05 conﬁdence intervals around the

predicted correlation. Therefore, consensus in this study is a two-dimensional construct.

89

Conditionality
This dimension was probed with questions 4, 11 and 18, which asked participants
to evaluate the degree that they believed the self-speciﬁed concept of what was creative,
not creative, or what was creative about a layout applied to every assignment. High
scores on the seven-point scales indicated that conditionality was low, which was
indicative of the presence of social norms. Analysis of the six items provided the

following means and standard deviations:

Table 18: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Conditionality by Individual

 

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
4 4.66 1 .74 243
1 1 5.26 1.73 243
1 8 5.14 1 .71 243
Summary 5.02 1 .73 243

When the 243 individuals in the sample were grouped into the 92 agencies, the following

means were calculated:

Table 19: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Conditionality by Agency

 

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
4 4.70 1.34 92
1 1 5.30 1.32 92
18 5.23 1.36 92
Summary 5.07 1.34 92

When the responses from 40 agencies, which only had one response per agency, were

eliminated, the following means were calculated, as shown in Table 20 on the next page.

90

Table 20: Descriptive Statistics for SNC Conditionality by using
Participants in Agencies with Multiple Responses

 

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
4 4.63 1 .75 92
1 1 5.22 1.76 92
1 8 5.12 1 .72 92
Summary 4.99 1 .74 92

The means appeared to indicate slight agreement that the speciﬁed norms were not
conditional, which would be consistent with the presence of social norms; but, the
standard deviations, which were substantial, may mitigate this ﬁnding; thus, this
dimension appeared to be the weakest of the three dimensions.

Item totals were calculated and correlations between the totals and the items were
obtained. All the item-total correlations were greater than .7 (Q4 = .720. p < .001;
Q11 = .803, p < .001, and Q18 = .772, p < .001), therefore all of the items were kept for
factor analysis.

A conﬁrmatory factor analysis was conducted that produced at mean correlation
within the cluster of .38, an eigenvalue of 1.2014 and a RMSE of .0082 (Table 21). A
reliability analysis for internal consistency produced a standard item alpha of .65. Thus,

all the items were kept for further analysis.

Table 21 : Observed Factor Matrix for Strength

911 018 04 F EV

 

Q11 .01 -.01 [.77 .5929
Q18 : .49 .00 i .63 .3969
Q4 1 .36 .29 .46 .2116

91

A Measure of Social Norms for Creativity

To produce one factor to use as the independent variable in the study, all items
(Questions 2, 9, and 16; 3, 5,10, and 17; 5, and 12, 19; and 4, 11 and 18) from each ofthe
four constructs, SNC Strength, SNC Consensus—Perception, SNC Consensus—
Agreement, and SNC Conditionality, were subjected to factor analysis with SPSS
software. An initial Principal Component Analysis extraction, using Varimax rotation
with Kaiser Normalization, produced three components with total eigenvalues equal to
9.7416, which explained 70.1% of the total variance. In an examination of the rotated
component matrix and the component plot in rotated space, Question 4 did not cluster
with the items in the three components, and it was dropped. The factor analysis was
repeated and the new total eigenvalues of 8.090 explained 73.54% of the variance;
however, another examination of the rotated component matrix and the component plot in
rotated space showed that Question 11 did not cluster with the other item in the three
components, and it was dropped. Therefore, a third factor analysis was conducted, and it
produced three components with an eigenvalue total of 7.780, which explained 77.9% of
the variance. More importantly, as shown in a component plot in rotated space, all of the
items were located in three distinct clusters.

The following component matrix reports (Table 22) the factor loadings for the
items in a one-factor solution using a Principal Component Analysis. All loadings are
above .620. The mean statistic for the ten items was 5.59 (SD = 1.11). Further, a
reliability analysis of these items produced a standardized item alpha of .9036. Therefore,
these ten item-questions were acceptable to serve as the items for the independent

variable, social norms for creativity.

92

Table 22: Component Matrix of SNC Items

Q2 .693
Q3 .723
Q5 .685
Q9 .695

Q10 .778

Q12 .786

Q16 .796

Q17 .782

Q18 .620

Q19 .759

As a check on the integrity of the social norm independent variable, a one-way ANOVA
was conducted to determine if variations in SNC could be explained by the following
demographic or descriptive indices: gender, age, terms of employment at the
respondents’ current agencies, length of career in advertising, job type, size of agency
and number of responses received per agency (Tables 23-29). No signiﬁcant difference
was found in social norms for creativity when the variable was evaluated by gender

(F (1,241) = .156, p > .05), by age (F (8,234) = .475, p > .05), by term of current
employment (F(10,232) = .1.393, p > .05), by length of career (F (10,232) = .449, p > .05),
by job type (F (3,239) = 1.360, p > .05), by agency size (F(4,238) = 1.524, p > .05), and
by the number of responses received per agency (F (10,232) = .511, p > .05). Therefore,
social norms for creativity can be evaluated without consideration of demographic or

descriptive categories.

Table 23: ANO VA of SNC by Gender

 

 

 

Sum of Sguares A Mean Sguare F Sig=
Between Groups .192 1 .192 .156 .693
Within Groups 296.269 241 1.229
Total 296.461 242

93

Table 24: ANO VA of SNC by Age Categories

 

 

Slﬂ of Squares df Mean Sguare F Sig=
Between Groups 4.734 8 .592 .475 .873
Within Groups 291.727 234 1.229
Total 296.461 242

Table 25 : ANO VA of SNC by Employment at Current Agency

 

 

Sum of Sguares df Mean Sguare F Sig
Between Groups 16.794 10 1.679 1.393 .184
Within Groups 279.667 232 1.205
Total 296.46] 242

Table 26: ANO VA of SNC by Length of Career in Advertising

 

 

Sum of Sguares df Mean Sguare F Sig,
Between Groups 5.632 10 .563 .449 .921
Within Groups 290.829 232 1.254
Total 296.461 242

Table 27: ANO VA of SNC by Job Categories

 

 

Sum of Squares df Mean Sguare F Sig,
Between Groups 4.978 3 1.659 1.360 .256
Within Groups 291.483 239 1.220
Total 296.461 242

Table 28: ANO VA of SNC by Size of Agency

 

 

Sum of Sguares df Mean Sguare F Sig,
Between Groups 7.404 4 1.851 1.524 .196
Within Groups 289.056 238 1.215
Total 296.461 242

Table 29: ANO VA of SNC by Number of Responses per Agency

 

 

 

Sm of Smres t_lf_ Mean Sguare F Sig:
Between Groups 6.388 10 .639 .511 .882
Within Groups 290.072 232 1.250
Total 296.461 242

94

Dependent Variables

The Issue of Independence in the Data

Before proceeding further, whenever data are collected from participants in group
or organizational environments, the issue of independence must be addressed. Effects
can come from differences between people individually and as a group. These two levels
of data are not independent from each other. Independence of observation is “a
fundamental assumption of normal theory” (Hoyle, Georgesen, & Webster, 2001, p. 41).
Respondents are independent when they are no more similar to one another than they are
to persons who are members of other groups (Kenny, Mannetti, Pierro, Livi, & Kashy,
2002). Nonindependence of data is a problem in statistical models, such as regression
and AN OVA, because it alters standard error or variance estimates used to test
signiﬁcance (Bliese & Hanges, 2004). The likelihood of type-l error may be increased.

This study collected data from people within the creative departments of
advertising agencies. On one hand, these copywriters and art directors typically work
together in teams of two persons. On the other hand, those copywriters and art directors,
who don’t work directly together, may have very little contact, if any, yet they are all
subject to the same social environment. The study investigated whether or not social
norms for creativity inﬂuenced the creative process at the individual level, and it did not
contain any provision for conﬁrming if any of the respondents worked together. It did
not examine agency differences quantitatively. The inﬂuence at the agency level was
built in to the study through the measures of social norms for creativity. Nevertheless,
the issue of independence between level-1 (individual effects) and level-2 (agency effects)

data was examined using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). This technique separates

95

the variance in each dependent variable, so that the effect of the level-2 data may be
determined. The objective was to see if the portion of variance due to the level-2 data
would undermine the analysis at the level-1 level.

The data set was split to include only those cases (n = 203) from 52 out of the 92
agencies that had two or more people responding to the survey. An HLM analysis of all
items in the study found the following results that are reported by dependent variable:

Intrinsic motivation: Level 2 contributed 2.01% of the variance, which meant
that level I contributed 97.99%. The amount of level-2 variance was not signiﬁcantly
different from zero (chi-square = 45.61 , df = 51, p > .05). Therefore individual-level
analysis is appropriate.

Nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation: 2.41% of the variance was attributed to
level 2, and it was not signiﬁcantly different from zero (chi-square = 48.88, df = 51, p
>.05).

Synergistic extrinsic motivation: 8.43% of the variance was due to level 2,
which was signiﬁcantly different from zero (chi-square = 74.78, df = 51, p < .017).

Problem identiﬁcation: 20.04% of the variance was from level 2, which was
signiﬁcantly different ﬁ'om zero (chi-square = 97.54, df = 51, p < .001).

Preparation: 11.35% of the variance was from level 2, and this was signiﬁcantly
different from zero (chi-square = 78.96, df = 51, p < .007).

Response generation: 6.77% of the variance was located in level 2, and this was
not signiﬁcantly different from zero (chi-square = 57.55, df = 51, p =.245).

Response validation: 6.68% of the variance was attributed to level 2, and this in

not signiﬁcantly different from zero (chi-square = 62.08, df = 51, p = .138).

96

To summarize, the effect of level—2 inﬂuence was not signiﬁcant in four out of the
seven variables and signiﬁcant in three. Therefore, the problem of independence should
not be an issue when analyzing the data in regards to intrinsic motivation, nonsynergistic
motivation, response generation, and response validation. Nonindependence, however, is
a concern with the other three variable—synergistic motivation, problem identiﬁcation,
and preparation—so the results relative to these variables should be interpreted with
caution, particularly with the problem-identiﬁcation variable. The impact of
nonindependence, however, is not a major threat to the basic thrust of the study, as will

be shown in sections ahead that present the conclusions and analyze the proposed model.

Reﬁnement of the Dependent Variables
All of the dependent variables were evaluated for validity using a conﬁrmatory

factor analysis (CFA).

Intrinsic Motivation
Question 22 contained seven items (A, B, C, D, E, F and G) that measured the
desire to complete a task based upon its contribution to an individual’s self worth. The

following data were obtained for each of the items:

Table 30: Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Intrinsic Motivation

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
22A 6.30 0.99 243
22B 5.59 1 .44 243
22C 6.01 1 .35 243
22D 6.39 1 .06 243
22E 5.57 1 .29 243
22F 6.08 0.98 243
22G 6.1 3 1 .1 8 243

97

An initial CFA of all items was rejected, because two of the 21 error statistics
were outside of the 95% conﬁdence intervals. Item C was dropped, leaving six items (A,
B, D, E, F and G), which formed an acceptable factor with an item-total mean of 6.01, a
mean correlation of .375, a standardized alpha of .78, total eigenvalues of 2.3256, and a

RMSE of.0327.

Table 31: Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the Factor of Intrinsic Motivation

G E F B A D Factor

G .00 .01 .04 -.02 -.02 .77
E .56 -.O6 .00 .05 .00 .73
F .48 .52 -.03 .05 .02 .63
B .38 .39 .37 -.04 .02 .54
A .43 .34 .28 .33 -.04 .53
D .39 .35 .28 .24 .29 .48

Nonsynergistic Extrinsic Motivation
Question 22 also contained ﬁve measures of motivation (M, N, O, P, and Q) from
outside sources that have been found to be not supportive of intrinsic motivation

(Amabile, 1996). The following data were obtained for each of the items:

Table 32: Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Nonsynergistic Extrinsic Motivation

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
22M 4.77 1 .81 243
22N 4.66 1 .83 243
220 5. 14 1 .70 243
22P 5.60 1 .45 243
22Q 4.31 1 .79 243

These items were subjected to a conﬁrmatory factor analysis, and all ﬁve

produced observed correlations with errors that were within their respective

98

.95 conﬁdence-level intervals. These items formed the factor of nonsynergistic extrinsic
motivation with an item-total mean of 4.90, a mean correlation of .247, a standardized

alpha of .62, total eigenvalues of 1.2708, and a RMSE of .0341.

Table 33 : Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Factor of Nonsynergistic Extrinsic Motivation

0 M P O N Factor

 

o ‘ .04 -.06 .01 .01 .57
M .27 .00 .03 .00 .55
P .36 .29 -.06 .01 .52
Q .26 .29 .18 .04 5 .47
N .20 .21 .19 .22 ? .39

Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation
Question 22 also contained ﬁve measures of motivation (H, I, J, K, and L) from
outside sources that have been found to be supportive of intrinsic motivation (Amabile,

1996). The following data were obtained:

Table 3 4: Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation

Question Mean SD N
(7—pt scale)
22H 6.38 0.95 243
221 6.54 0.92 243
22J 5.40 1 .91 243
22K 5. 19 1 .73 243
22L 6.21 1 .22 243

An initial conﬁrmatory factor analysis rejected the ﬁve-item solution, because an
error statistic from one of the observed correlations was outside its .95 conﬁdence-level

interval. Dropping item J produced an acceptable factor (Table 35) composed of four

99

items with an item-total mean of 6.08, a mean correlation of .246, a standardized alpha

of .57, total eigenvalues of 1.0219, and a RMSE of .0408.

Table 35 : Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Factor of Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation

 

7311‘"!

Problem Identiﬁcation

11 I I. r< Iﬁggpg
.05 .05 .00 .57
.37 .00 .05 ,.57
.22 .27 405 |.47
.22 .17 .23 ,.39

Questions 6, 13 and 20 contained nine items (6A, 6B, 6C, 13A, 13B, 13C, 20A,

20B, and 20C) to measure the inﬂuence of social norms for creativity on the problem-

identiﬁcation stage of the creative process. Participants were asked how much their

notion of what was creative, not creative, and creative in a layout lirrrited the way creative

problems were deﬁned, limited the way situation input was analyzed, and limited the

objectives of the assignments. The following data were obtained:

Table 3 6: Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Problem Identiﬁcation

Question

6A
6B
6C
13A
13B
13C
20A
20B
20C

Mean SD
(7-pt scale)
2.89 2.40
3.00 2.44
2.53 2.31
3.52 2.59
3.18 2.48
3.04 2.57
3.00 2.49
2.88 2.45
2.62 2.35

100

N

243
243
243
243
243
243
243
243
243

An initial conﬁrmatory factor analysis of all nine items was rejected, because 15
out of the 36 correlations represented observations that varied from predicted correlations
with error terms outside of their respective .95 conﬁdence-level intervals. A reduced set
of four items (6B, 6C, 13B, and 20A) comprised an acceptable factor with an item-total
mean of 2.92, a mean correlation of .436, a standardized alpha of .76, total eigenvalues of

1.761, and a RMSE of.0208.

Table 3 7: Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Factor of Problem Identiﬁcation

6B 20A 6C 138 Factor

68 .05 .05 .00 . , .57

20A .37 .00 .05 l .57

6C .22 .27 -.05 ‘ .47

1313 , .22 .17 .23 . .39
Preparation

Questions 6, 13 and 20 also contained nine items (6D, 6E, 6F, 13D, 13E, 13F,
20D, 20B, and 20F) to measure the inﬂuence of social norms for creativity on the
preparation stage of the creative process. Participants were asked how much their notion
of what was creative, not creative, and what was creative about a layout directed the way
they thought about a creative problem, affected the way they sought out information, and

affected the way they thought about possible solutions. The following data were obtained:

101

Table 38: Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Preparation

Question

6D
6E
6F
13D
13E
13F
20D
20E
20F

Mean SD
(7-pt scale)
5.73 1.84
4.72 2.36
5.74 1.95
4.92 2.42
3.96 2.64
4.98 2.40
5.51 3.84
4.25 2.42
5.33 2.01

N

243
243
243
243
243
243
243
243
243

An initial conﬁrmatory factor analysis of all nine items was rejected, because 11

of the 36 correlations represented observations that varied from predicted correlations

with error terms outside of their respective .95 conﬁdence-level intervals. A reduced set

of ﬁve items (6D, 6E, 6F, 13F and 20F ) comprised an acceptable factor with an item-total

mean of 5.30, a mean correlation of .402, a standardized alpha of .77, total eigenvalues of

2.1105, and a RMSE of.0420.

Table 3 9: Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the Factor of Preparation

 

6D 6F 6E 13F g0]? chtor
6D . -.05 -.04 .05 .01 ’80
6F .69 -.02 .02 .02 .80
6E ‘ .55 .50 .00 .04 .60
13F r .34 .37 .29 .09 .49
20F .37 .36 .25 .33 .48

Response Generation

Questions 7, 14 and 21 contained three items (7a, 14a, and 21a) to measure the

inﬂuence of social norms for creativity on the response generation stage of the creative

process. Participants were asked how much their notion of what was creative, not

102

creative, or creative in a layout affected the number of concepts generated. The

following data were obtained:

Table 40: Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Response Generation

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
7A 4.43 1 .76 243
14A 4.26 1.76 243
21A 4.55 1.44 243

A conﬁrmatory factor analysis of the three items produced a one-factor solution
with error terms inside their respective .95 conﬁdence-level intervals. Therefore, these
items comprised an acceptable factor with an item-total mean of 4.41 , a mean correlation

of .37, a standardized alpha of .64, total eigenvalues of 1.1525, and a RMSE of .0000.

Table 41 : Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Factor of Response Generation

7A 21A 14A Factor

7A .00 .00 ‘ .72
21A .47 .00 .65
14A .33 .30 ' .46

103

Response Validation

Questions 7, 14 and 21 also contained 18 items (7B, 7C, 7D, 7E, 7F, 7G, 14B,
14C,14D,14E,14F,14G, 21B, 21C, 21D, 21E, 21F, and 21G) to measure the inﬂuence
of social norms for creativity on the response-validation stage of the creative process.
Participants were asked how much their notion of what was creative, not creative, or
creative in a layout affected the overall value (7B, 14B, 21B), originality (7C, 14C, 21C),
attention-getting power (7D, 14D, 21D), relevance (7E, 14E, 21E), believability (7F, 14F,
21F), and persuasiveness (7G, 14G, 21G) of the ads that they created. The following data

were obtained:

Table 42: Descriptive Statistics for Items relating to Response Validation

Question Mean SD N
(7-pt scale)
Overall 7B 5.89 1 .76 243
14B 4.92 2.07 243
21B 5.76 1.35 243
Originality 7C 5.72 1 .42 243
14C 5.12 2.02 243
21 C 5.86 1.30 243
Attention 7D 6.05 1 .30 243
14D 4.98 2.09 243
21D 6.1 1 1.19 243
Relevance 7E 5.55 1 .33 243
14E 4.71 1.86 243
21E 5.21 1.3 8 243
Believability 7F 5.30 1.32 243
14F 4.58 l .81 243
21 F 5.10 1 .32 243
Persuasiveness 7G 5.75 1.31 243
14G 4.78 1.94 243
21 G 5.75 1 .20 243

104

Six subscales for the response-evaluation stage were built to evaluate Hypotheses
13a, b, c, d, e, and f. All six subscales were evaluated for internal consistency and
reliability. The scale measuring the effect of SNC on overall quality (Table 43) was
internally consistent with no errors from the observed correlations exceeding the .95
conﬁdence-level intervals around the predicted correlations. The inter-item correlation
was .31; standardized alpha was .57; total eigenvalues were 1.1178; and the RMSE

was .0057.

Table 43 : Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Response Validation Subscale of Overall Quality

7B 21A 14A Factor
7B . .00 .00 ; .79
21B: .51 -.01 ‘ .64
14B. .23 .18 .29
The scale measuring the effect of SNC on originality (Table 44) was internally consistent
with no errors from the observed correlations exceeding the .95 conﬁdence-level intervals

around the predicted correlations. The inter-item correlation was .31; standardized alpha

was .57; total eigenvalues were 1.0697; and the RMSE was .0000.

Table 44 : Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Response Validation Subscale of Originality

ﬁZIC 7C 14C Factor

 

not .00 .00 ; .72
7C .48 .00 . .67
14c .23 .21 - .32

The scale measuring the effect of SNC on attention-getting power (Table 45) was
internally consistent with no errors from the observed correlations exceeding the .95

conﬁdence-level intervals around the predicted correlations. The inter-item correlation

105

was .32; standardized alpha was .59; total eigenvalues were 1.1210; and the RMSE

was .0057.

Table 45 : Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Response Validation Subscale ofAttention-getting Power

7D 21D 14D Factor
7D .00 -.01 l .79
21D‘ .49 .00 l .64
14D .27 .20 I .29
The scale measuring the effect of SNC on the advertising’s relevance (Table 46) was
internally consistent with no errors from the observed correlations exceeding the .95
conﬁdence-level intervals around the predicted correlations. The inter-item correlation

was .25; standardized alpha was .50; total eigenvalues were 0.8498; and the RMSE

was .0057.

Table 4 6: Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Response Validation Subscale of Advertising Relevance

21E 7E 14E Factor

 

21E. .00 .00 1 .65
7E * .37 -.01 ‘ .57
14E .21 .18 . .32

The scale measuring the effect of SNC on the advertising’s believability (Table 47 on the
next page) was internally consistent with no errors from the observed correlations
exceeding the .95 conﬁdence-level intervals around the predicted correlations. The inter-
item correlation was .35; standardized alpha was .61; total eigenvalues were 1.1738; and

the RMSE was .0057.

106

Table 4 7: Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Response Validation Subscale of Advertising Believability

7F glF 14F Factor

 

7F .01 .00 ‘ .80
21F; .51 .00 1* .63
14F: .30 .23 : .37

The scale measuring the effect of SNC on the advertising’s persuasiveness (Table 48)
was internally consistent with no errors from the observed correlations exceeding the .95
conﬁdence-level intervals around the predicted correlations. The inter-item correlation
was .38. Standardized alpha was .64; total eigenvalues were 1.3173; and the RMSE
was .0000.
Table 48: Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the
Response Validation Subscale of Advertising Persuasiveness

21G 7G 14G Factor

 

210 .00 .00 T .79
7G ‘ .60 .00 I .76
14c; .27 .26 i .34

To obtain a single variable to use for the response-evaluation stage in the model, a
conﬁrmatory factor analysis was conducted using the item totals of the six sub-scales. An
initial conﬁrmatory factor analysis of all six subscales was rejected, because four of the
15 correlations represented observations that varied from the predicted correlations with
error terms outside of their respective .95 conﬁdence-level intervals. After several scales
were eliminated, a reduced set of three subscales—Quality (7b, 14b, 21b), Originality (7c,

14c, 21c), and Attention-getting Power (7d, 14d, 21d)—formed an acceptable factor

107

(Table 49) with a mean inter-item correlation of .86, a standardized alpha of .95,

eigenvalues of 2.5979, and a RMSE of .0057.

Table 49: Observed Correlations and Error Terms for the full
Response Validation Scale

Attention Orig]! ality Quality Factor

Attention .01 .00 | .97
Originality ' .90 .00 ; .93
Quality .86 .83 .89

General Qualitative and Quantitative Conclusions about Variables

1. Valid variables were obtained for all eight constructs. Reliabilities varied ﬁ'om .90
for the independent variable, social norms for creativity, to .56 for synergistic
extrinsic motivation. Reliabilities for the variables related to the creative process
varied from .64 to .95.

2. Social norms for creativity exist within advertising agencies. They were evident by
the verbatim descriptions for what is creative in advertising, what is not creative, and
what shows creative in an advertising layout. Generally, social norms were primarily
comprised of attitudes that reﬂected the deﬁnition of creativity: originality and
relevance. Attractiveness or attention-getting value was very important. When social
norms for creativity were more speciﬁcally expressed in terms of advertising layouts,
the leading categories were attractiveness and originality. Value or substance was
deﬁned in terms of design qualities, which makes sense considering the artistic nature
of layouts.

3. Social norms were also evident in the quantitative evaluations of the dimension:
strength, consensus and conditionality. Respondents thought others in the agency

moderately agreed with their self-deﬁnitions of the constructs (means for strength =

108

5.67, others’ consensus = 5.48, and respondents’ agreement = 5.75). They also
leaned toward the belief that these norms apply most of the time (mean for lack of
conditionality = 5.02). Again, relatively large standard deviations indicate caution is
needed to avoid overstating their overall strength.

. Respondents appeared to be highly motivated intrinsically, as the data received
showed a mean of 6.01 (SD .80) for the seven-point scale.

. As for the inﬂuence of extrinsic motivation, respondents appeared to be more
motivated by synergistic factors than nonsynergistic factors. A paired-sample t test
was conducted to compare the mean for nonsynergistic motivation (4.90, SD = 1.07)
with the mean for synergistic motivation (6.08, SD = .80). A signiﬁcant difference
was found (t(242) = 16.289, p < .001).

. Participants apparently did not think that social norms for creativity inﬂuenced the
problem identiﬁcation stage of the creative process, because the mean was 2.92

(SD = 1.87) on a seven-point scale. This ﬁnding is the ﬁrst of several to come that
mitigates the importance of the non-independence issue with this variable.

. Participants appeared to think that social norms for creativity inﬂuenced the
preparation stage of the creative process, because the mean was 5.30 (SD = 1.52) on
a seven-point scale.

. Participants did not seem to think that social norms for creativity inﬂuenced the
response generation stage of the creative process, because the mean was 4.41

(SD = 1.26).

. Participants appeared to think that social norms for creativity inﬂuenced the response

validation stage of the creative process, because the mean was 5.60 (SD = 1.087).

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Testing the Hypotheses
Correlations were calculated to evaluate the relationships between the
independent variable, social norms for creativity, the three dependent variables of

motivation, and the four dependent variables relating to the creative process.

Table 50: Correlations of Variables

Variable SNC IM NSEM SEM PID Prep RG
[M l -.001

NSEM‘ .104 .06]

SEM .148* .117 298*

PH) .024 .030 .094 .066

Prep ;‘ .172“ .125 .035 .125 .345”

RG -.O32 .1 15 -.025 .096 .135* .082

RV .209" .130* -.034 .191 * .004 .306**.322**

*signiﬁcant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed)
"signiﬁcant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)

Hypothesis I predicted a positive relationship between SNC and intrinsic
motivation. It was not supported (r(242) = -.001, p > .05). Social norms for creativity
did not increase intrinsic motivation.

Hypothesis 2 predicted a positive relationship between SNC and synergistic
motivation, and it was supported by correlation data (r(242) = .148, p < .05) and a simple
linear regression analysis predicting synergistic extrinsic motivation based on SNC. A
signiﬁcant regression was found (F (1,242) = 5.366, p < .05) with an R2 of .022 (Table 51
on the next page). As social norms for creativity increased, synergistic extrinsic

motivation increased.

110

Table 51 .' ANO VA Predicting Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation based on SNC

Sum of Sguares (_lf Mean Sguare F Sig._

Regression 3.288 1 3.288 5.366 .021
Residual 147.689 241 .613
Total 150.977 242

Predictor: (constant): social norms for creativity
Dependent variable: synergistic extrinsic motivation

Hypothesis 3 predicted a positive relationship between synergistic extrinsic
motivation and intrinsic motivation. It was not supported (r(242) = .117, p > .05).
Synergistic extrinsic motivation did not affect intrinsic motivation. This ﬁnding is
counter to the conclusions in most published literature (see Amabile, 1996).

Hypothesis 4 predicted a negative relationship between SNC and nonsynergistic
extrinsic motivation. It was not supported (r(242) = .104, p > .05). Social norms for
creativity did not appear to decrease the respondents’ nonsynergistic motivation.

Hypothesis 5 predicted a negative relationship between nonsynergistic extrinsic
motivation and intrinsic motivation. It was not supported (r(242) = .061, p > .05).
Nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation did not appear to decrease the respondents’ intrinsic
motivation.

Hypothesis 6 predicted a positive relationship between intrinsic motivation and
the problem identiﬁcation stage of the creative process. It was not supported (r(242)
= .030, p > .05). Intrinsic motivation did not appear to inﬂuence respondents’
perceptions of their ability to deﬁne problem, analyze the situation, and determine the
objectives. This insigniﬁcant relationship is the second conclusion that mitigates the
problem of non-independence in this study in regards to the problem-identiﬁcation

variable.

11]

Hypothesis 7 predicted a positive relationship between intrinsic motivation and
the response generation stage of the creative process. It was not supported by correlation
data (r(242) = .115, p > .05). Intrinsic motivation did not appear to affect the
respondents’ perceptions of their ability to increase the number of creative alternatives.

Hypothesis 8 predicted a positive relationship between synergistic extrinsic
motivation and the preparation stage of the creative process. It was not supported (r(242)
= .125, p > .05). Synergistic extrinsic motivation did not appear to inﬂuence
respondents’ perceptions of the way they thought about the creative problem, sought out
information, or the manner in which they examined possible solutions.

Hypothesis 9 predicted a positive relationship between synergistic extrinsic
motivation and the response validation stage of the creative process. It was supported by
correlation data (r(242) = .191, p < .05) and a simple linear regression analysis predicting
improved perceptions about the response validation stage of the creative process based on
levels of synergistic extrinsic motivation. A signiﬁcant regression was found (F (242) =
9.174, p < .05) with an R2 of .037. As social norms for creativity increased, so too did
perceptions concerning validating advertising. Therefore, synergistic extrinsic
motivation appeared to inﬂuence respondents’ positive perceptions of their advertising’s

overall quality, originality and attention-getting power.

Table 52: ANO VA Predicting Response Validation
based on Synergistic Extrinsic Motivation

Sm of Squares gr Mean Sguare F Sig._

Regression 10.492 1 10.492 9.174 .003
Residual 275.634 241 1.144
Total 286.127 242

Predictor: (constant): Synergistic extrinsic motivation
Dependent variable: Response validation

112

Hypothesis 10 predicted a positive relationship between SNC and the problem
identiﬁcation stage of the creative process. It was not supported (r(242) = .024, p > .05).
Social norms for creativity did not increase the respondents’ perceptions of their ability to
deﬁne problem, analyze the situation, and determine the objectives. This insigniﬁcant
relationship is the third conclusion that mitigates the problem of non-independence in this
study in regards to the problem-identiﬁcation variable.

Hypothesis 11 predicted a positive relationship between SNC and the preparation
stage of the creative process. It was supported by correlation data (r(242) = .172, p < .01)
and a simple linear regression analysis predicting improvement in preparation based on
levels of social norms for creativity (Table 53). A signiﬁcant regression was found
(F(242) = 7.368, p < .01) with an R2 of .030. Social norms for creativity did appear to
increase the respondents’ perception of their abilities to think about the creative problem,

seek out information, and examine possible solutions.

Table 53: ANO VA Predicting Preparation in the Creative Process
based on Social Norms for Creativity

Sum of Sguares (_lf Mean Sguare F Sig._

 

 

Regression 16.580 1 16.580 7.368 .007
Residual 542.330 241 2.250
Total 558.910 242

Predictor: (constant): Social norms for creativity
Dependent variable: Preparation

Hypothesis 12 predicted a negative relationship between SNC and the response
generation stage of the creative process. It was not supported by the correlation data
(r(242) = -.032, p > .05). Social norms for creativity did not appear to decrease

respondents’ perception of their abilities to generate more concepts.

113

Hypothesis 13a predicted a positive association between SNC and respondents’
perceived level of quality in their advertisements, as part of the response validation stage
of the creative process. It was supported by correlation data (r(242) = .209, p < .01) and
a simple linear regression analysis predicting perceived quality based on levels of social
norms for creativity (Table 54). A signiﬁcant regression was found (F (242) = 11.037, p
< .01) with an R2 of .044. Social norms for creativity did appear to increase the

respondents’ perception of quality in their advertisements.

Table 54: ANO VA Predicting Perceived Quality of Advertisements
based on Social Norms for Creativity

Simf Sguares df Mean Sguare F Sig.__

 

 

Regression 13.982 1 13.982 1 1.037 .001
Residual 305.295 241 1.267
Total 319.277 242

Predictor: (constant): Social norms for creativity
Dependent variable: Perceived quality

Hypothesis 13b predicted a positive association between SNC and respondents’
perceived level of originality in their advertisements, as part of the response validation
stage of the creative process. It was supported by correlation data (r(242) = .188, p < .01)
and a simple linear regression analysis predicting perceived originality based on levels of
social norms for creativity (Table 55 on the next page). A signiﬁcant regression was
found (F(242) = 8.839, p < .01) with an R2 of.035. Social norms for creativity did

appear to increase the respondents’ perception of originality in their advertisements.

114

Table 55: ANO VA Predicting Perceived Originality of Advertisements
based on Social Norms for Creativity

Sum; of Squares (_if Mean Square F Sig;

Regression 11.358 1 11.358 8.839 .003
Residual 309.693 241 1 .285
Total 321.052 242

Predictor: (constant): Social norms for creativity
Dependent variable: Perceived originality
Hypothesis 13c predicted a positive association between SNC and respondents’

perceived level of attention-getting power in their advertisements, as part of the response
validation stage of the creative process. It was supported by correlation data (r(242)
= .200, p < .01) and a simple linear regression analysis predicting perceived attention-
getting power based on levels of social norms for creativity (Table 56). A signiﬁcant
regression was found (F(242) = 10.012, p < .01) with an R2 of .040. Social norms for
creativity did appear to increase the respondents’ perception of attention-getting power in

their advertisements.

Table 56: ANO VA Predicting Perceived Attention-getting Power
of Advertisements based on Social Norms for Creativity

Sign of Squares dj Mean Square F Sig.

Regression 12.266 1 12.266 10.012 .002
Residual 295.266 241 1.225
Total 307.532 242

Predictor: (constant): Social norms for creativity
Dependent variable: Perceived attention-getting power
Hypothesis 13d predicted a positive association between SNC and respondents’
perceived level of relevance in their advertisements, as part of the response validation
stage of the creative process. It was supported by correlation data (r(242) = .191, p < .01)

and a simple linear regression analysis predicting improvement in preparation based on

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levels of social norms for creativity (Table 57). A signiﬁcant regression was found
(F(242) = 9.147, p < .01) with an R2 of .037. Social norms for creativity did appear to

increase the respondents’ perception of relevance in their advertisements.

Table 5 7: ANO VA Predicting Perceived Relevance of Advertisements
based on Social Norms for Creativity

Sum of Sqr_rares t_lf Mean Square F SEL

 

 

Regression 10.225 1 10.225 9.147 .003
Residual 269.405 241 1.1 18
Total 279.630 242

Predictor: (constant): Social norms for creativity
Dependent variable: Perceived relevance
Hypothesis 13c predicted a positive association between SNC and respondents’

perceived level of believability in their advertisements, as part of the response validation
stage of the creative process. It was supported by correlation data (r(242) = .189, p < .01)
and a simple linear regression analysis predicting perceived believability based on levels
of social norms for creativity (Table 58). A signiﬁcant regression was found (F (242) =
8.889, p < .01) with an R2 of .036. Social norms for creativity did appear to increase the

respondents’ perception of believability in their advertisements.

Table 58: ANO VA Predicting Perceived Believability of Advertisements
based on Social Norms for Creativity

Su_r_n of Squares df Mean Square F Sig._

 

 

Regression 10.525 1 10.525 8.839 .003
Residual 285.360 241 1.184
Total 295.885 242

Predictor: (constant): Social norms for creativity
Dependent variable: Perceived believability

Hypothesis 13f predicted a positive association between SNC and respondents’

perceived level of persuasion in their advertisements, as part of the response validation

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stage of the creative process. It was supported by correlation data (r(242) = .241 , p < .01)
and a simple linear regression analysis predicting perceived persuasiveness based on
levels of social norms for creativity (Table 59). A signiﬁcant regression was found

(F (242) = 14.812, p < .01) with an R2 of .058. Social norms for creativity did appear to

increase the respondents’ perception of persuasiveness in their advertisements.

Table 59: ANO VA Predicting Perceived Persuasiveness of Advertisements
based on Social Norms for Creativity

Sig of Squares ﬁdf Mean Square F SiL

Regression 17.891 1 17.891 14.812 .000
Residual 291.106 241 1.208
Total 308.997 242

Predictor: (constant): Social norms for creativity
Dependent variable: Perceived persuasiveness

Additional Signiﬁcant Findings

The study found a number of signiﬁcant relationships in addition to those
hypothesized. The strongest unpredicted relationships were between the stages of the
creative process. Predictions were not made for these relationships to be consistent with
Amabile’s model, on which this model is based. Amabile made no predictions between
the stages of the creative process, because “large variations in the sequence are possible”
(Amabile, 1996, p. 123). This study found signiﬁcant relationships between problem
identiﬁcation and preparation (r(242) = .345, p < .01), between problem identiﬁcation
and response generation (r(242) = .135, p < .01), between preparation and response
validation (r(242) = .306, p < .01), and between response generation and response

validation (r(242) = .322, p < .01). These strong correlations could have been expected

117

due to the nature of the creative process in advertising and the stages that have been well
deﬁned by Young (1940) and others.

An interesting unanticipated ﬁnding was the relationship between intrinsic
motivation and response validation (r(242) = .130, p < .01). The question here is about
the direction of the effect. The model would imply that as advertising creative
professionals become more intrinsically motivated, their perceptions of their
advertisement’s attention-getting power, relevance, believability and persuasiveness will
increase. Perhaps, the relationship is reversed. The more those creative professionals
believe their advertising gets attention, is relevant, is believed, and is persuasive, the
higher their intrinsic motivation could become.

The remaining unpredicted ﬁnding is the most difﬁcult to explain. The data
support a conclusion that there is a positive relationship (r(242) = .298, p < .01) between
nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation (the motivation that results ﬁom negative inﬂuencers)
and synergistic extrinsic motivation, (the motivation that comes from positive external
sources). In other words, the results would seem to imply that the more negative
inﬂuencers there are, the more positive inﬂuencers there are. This ﬁnding may reﬂect the
complexity of situations. As situations become more complex with more external
pressure, the good comes along with the bad, and vice versa. Further explanation will be

leﬁ to future research.

Summary of Signiﬁcant Paths in Proposed Model
Signiﬁcant predicted paths were found from social norms for creativity (SNC) to
synergistic extrinsic motivation, to preparation, and to response validation (Resp Val) and

its subscales of quality, originality, attention-getting power, relevance, believability and

118

persuasiveness. A signiﬁcant path was also found ﬁom synergistic extrinsic motivation to
the response validation stages. See the heavy solid paths in Figure 7. Additional paths
were found between intrinsic motivation and response validation, between nonsynergistic
extrinsic motivation and synergistic extrinsic motivation, and between the various stages

of the creative process. These paths are shown in heavy dashed lines on Figure 7.

119

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intrin Mot ———————— .-
A k I
Problem ID — -I
l I
H5 - H10 + I I
H1 + I I
| |
|
H3 + H7 + I I
/ v I
Preparation - :
/ H11 + I
4 I
SNC \ NS EXI MOI :
I
H12 + l
' Resp Gen n -I
H8 + | I
I I
I 13 I I
H2 + I I I
I + I I
I I I
I J I
: Resp Val :1
I
I H9 +
V
Syn Ext Mot
KEY

 

Signiﬁcant predicted paths —
Signiﬁcant unpredicted paths - - - ->

Figure 7: Summary of Signiﬁcant Paths in Proposed Model

120

Testing of the Creative Process Model
As an additional evaluation of the proposed model of the creative process and
social norms for creativity, the model was subjected to a structural equation modeling
(SEM) analysis using AMOS 6.0 software program. The model (Figure 8) appeared to be
acceptable (chi square = 11.012, df = 8, p = .201, GFI = .989, CFI = .977, RMSEA = .039,
and low 90 =.000. Four signiﬁcant paths were found, which supported Hypotheses 2, 9,

11, and 13. These paths are highlighted below in bold in Figure 8.

Table 60: Standardized Estimates for Model Paths

 

 

Path Estiyte S.E. C.R. P
nonsynmo <--- totalsnc .104 .062 1.621 .105
synexmo <-- totalsnc .148 .045 2.321 .020
intrinsi <--- totalsnc -.021 .047 -.320 .749
intrinsi <--- synexmo .1 1 1 .069 1.646 .100
intrinsi <--- nonsynmo .030 .050 .444 .657
problem <--- totalsnc .024 .109 .371 .710
validate <-- totalsnc .189 .062 3.015 .003
problem <--- intrinsi -.001 .140 -.025 .980
validate <— synexmo .138 .082 2.320 .020
generat <--- totalsnc -.032 .073 -.507 .612
prepar <-- totalsnc .161 .087 2.526 .012
generat <--- intrinsi .079 .095 1.301 .193

prepar <-— synexmo .078 .115 1.302 .193

Note that the paths to the problem stage of the creative process were not
signiﬁcant, which represents the fourth ﬁnding that mitigates the problem of non-

independence in this study in regards to the problem-identiﬁcation variable.

121

 

89... .
‘_—

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intrin Mot 00 ’4—
‘ \ .00
Problem II)
.11
.13
_.02 .34
/ £9
.16 Preparation
/10 £9.01 .08 .07 -.01
SNC . ‘
NS Ext Mot @ ‘4
‘—.—_
‘—
.01
-.03 ‘ Resp Gen '27
.32
.19 .29
{—-
S.—_——
.15 .06 ‘
Resp Val
629+— .14
.02
Syn Ext Mot

 

 

 

Figure 8: Structural Equation Model of the Creative Process

(Signiﬁcant paths are in bold)

122

CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION

Findings

This study demonstrated for the ﬁrst time in known published research that social
norms for creativity exist within advertising agencies—not deﬁned as what makes an
organization more creative—but deﬁned as what the organization’s members think are
the operant values of what is and is not creative. These social norms for creativity
generally consisted of attitudes that reﬂected the widely held deﬁnition of creativity as
novel and relevant. Attractiveness and substance were also key components.

The study measured social norms for creativity and its three predicted
dimensions—strength, consensus, and conditionality—which showed moderate strength
(mean = 5.58, SD = 1.11) and held up to the scrutiny of conﬁrmatory factor analysis.
This study found that social norms for creativity can have a measurable impact on the
creative process and motivation. The study tested a model of the creative process and
found that social norms can affect the creative process directly, rather than just indirectly
through motivation, as previously theorized but left open for debate. Social norms for
creativity directly affected the preparation and response-validation stages, probably
because these three stages are where creative ideas are formed into advertising concepts
and evaluated for their quality, originality, attention-getting power, relevance,
believability and persuasive value. The problem-identiﬁcation stage, where the problem
is deﬁned, limited and analyzed, seems to be viewed as less of a creative activity. The
creative process as a whole, with its ﬁve steps (outcome was not studied as part of this

research), was strongly supported.

123

Consistent with the stance taken by this study that social norms are supportive of
the creative process, respondents thought that social norms for creativity slightly-to-
moderately increased these effects. In other words, social norms for creativity were not
viewed as disadvantageous to the process. Social norms for what is and is not creative
appear to enhance rather than inhibit creativity. This ﬁnding was repeated in the
preparation stage. Social norms for creativity did not appear to inhibit the way
respondents thought about the creative problem, sought out information and thought
about possible solutions.

At the intermediate level of the model, social norms for creativity affected
synergistic (beneﬁcial) extrinsic motivation but did not affect intrinsic motivation or
nonsynergistic (detrimental) extrinsic motivation. This makes sense, because social
norms are external moderators of motivation, which could be expected to affect a
person’s self motivation indirectly through synergistic extrinsic motivation. No
signiﬁcant link was found between synergistic extrinsic motivation and intrinsic
motivation, which as noted, does not conform to previous research (Amabile, 1996), but
this is just one study.

Some would say that agency creative professionals are highly skeptical and
cynical about attempts to deﬁne creativity. Most respondents were very cooperative in
answering the survey, but one respondent wrote the following as an answer to what
shows creativity in layouts; “Whoever you are, you’re being far too egg-headed in your
approach to creativity. Creativity is special, because it can’t be quantiﬁed. That’s what
makes it special.” Several other people deﬂected the issues by attributing the limits of

creativity to such outside causes as clients, account managers, budgets, and time

124

pressures. One respondent took the time to write an e-mail to the researcherto comment
on these outside limitations, but in doing so, the message was most telling about the
power of social norms for creativity. The individual wrote, “A truism in most agencies is
that ‘the best work never leaves the building.’ That’s because if it’s too original, too
different, too edgy, too far ﬁ'om the expected, these people are just not comfortable with
it.” If this sentiment is truly representative as the writer states, then social norms for
creativity very much may be the biggest determinant in the creative process.

Indeed, the phenomena of social norms for creativity appears, at least ﬁ'om the
qualitative results of this study, to operate on a far broader level than within each agency,
and therefore these norms may be more powerful than originally conceived. The
verbatim comments about what is creative, not creative and creative for layouts showed
remarkable similarity from agency to agency. A third of the comments about what is
creative reﬂected originality; 42% of the comments about what is not creative reﬂected
unoriginality; and attractiveness qualities were strongly represented in each category.
This conclusion was supported coincidentally by an e-mail that the researcher received
ﬁ'om a respondent in reply to being sent a report of the survey’s qualitative results. The
respondent stated: “It’s one thing for creatives at an agency to discuss processes and our
opinions about what is creative among our peers; it’s another (and completely fulﬁlling)
thing to see that other creatives in other places feel the same way.” Hence, social norms
for creativity may be an industry-wide phenomenon. This industry-wide perspective on
social norms also would appear to counter the above comment that creativity is that

unique or special from agency to agency, person to person.

125

Implications

If people are to understand the creative process, it is not enough to comprehend its
traditional ﬁve steps. Work can be undertaken to improve the manner in which the
problem is identiﬁed. Creative teams can become better prepared by learning more about
the topic. They can hone their creative skills. They can use brainstorming and other
techniques to generate more novel and relevant concepts. They can develop better
processes by which to evaluate proposed campaigns; and they can measure the effects of
outcomes against goals; but they can still miss a fundamental piece of the puzzle, if they
ignore, not just the everyday social norms of working together, but also, more relevantly,
the social norms for creativity—what is and is not creative—that establish the paradigm
for the whole process.

Agencies need to learn more about the social norms for creativity that exist within
their organization; not the formal platitudes and espoused philosophies, but the day-to-
day working social values of right and wrong that may have the most impact on creative
outcomes. Typically, agencies just put teams together out of convenience and hope for
the best. The more that people in agency organizations become aware of the operant
social norms for creativity, the better they will be able to put these standards to good use,
the more they can challenge these standards to achieve new expressions of advertising
and the more successful their agencies will become in developing a clear vision of what
they represent, what they offer and who they serve.

Perhaps people inside an advertising agency produce a certain type of ad because
they are operating under some unstated assumptions about what is and is not creative.

Perhaps creative people within an agency organization have different values about

126

creativity, which may be productive or counter-productive. Perhaps people are holding
on to concepts about creativity because they think others in the organization believe these
values are important when they are not. Greater awareness and discussion about social

norms for creativity will bring these issues into the light.

Limitations

When discussing the results of this study, it must be kept in mind that the
dimensions of social norms for creativity were measured indirectly as perceptions from
the point of view of the respondents, rather than directly as attitudes of the group. Due to
the limitations imposed by the survey method, participants were asked to rate their
perception of the strengths of social norms within their agency, the degree of consensus,
and the degree of conditionality. To measure these constructs more directly, a researcher
would have to ask each person within the agency about the degree to which they believed
in a speciﬁed set of social norms; then, the operant (versus the perceived) levels of
strength, consensus and conditionality could be more accurately determined.

The study also was limited by the small number of responses per agency that
restricted agency-level analysis. The desired population of creative professionals is very
difﬁcult to reach and motivate in regards to a research study. While the 243 respondents
provided an adequate sample for the analysis, there was a 71% abandon rate, which may
indicate that the study had greater potential or that respondents simply may have logged
on to the survey once to check it out, then logged on later when it was more convenient to
complete the whole questionnaire. The causes of this drop-out rate could be investigated
to see whether or not there were some latent qualities in the survey instrument itself that

were responsible for the disconnect.

127

More responses were obtained when an individual inside an agency, such as a
creative director, took a personal interest and championed the study. For example,
creative directors at the a large independent agency and a Midwestern ofﬁce of a Top—10
agency group became very involved in the decision to have their staffs participate in the
survey, and these two agencies provided the highest number of responses per agency.

This observation brings up a potential hidden bias in the study. If more responses
came from agencies with creative directors, who were actively interested in the study,
then this may indicate that agencies with stronger response rates may have stronger social
norms (and vice versa). Even further, there may be a stronger bias toward social norms
in agencies that responded versus those that didn’t respond. A ﬁnding, however, was that
among those agencies that responded, there was no signiﬁcant differences attributable to
response rates, but, do the agencies that responded reﬂect the total agency population?
The survey achieved responses from 24.2% of the top 200 agencies and 13.8% of the vast
majority of other agencies with an organizational structure, so the inclination is to
conclude that the sample does represent the population, but this is just one study.

Another bias could be that people who are most inﬂuenced by social norms were the
people who responded. This could indicate a strong bias toward a reporting of social
norms, but the mean of social norms for creativity and the means for each dimension of

SNC were not extreme.

Possible Improvements and New Directions
Overall, the methods employed worked very well, and the online survey method
simpliﬁed the process for participants and the researcher. Advertising agencies, by the

very nature of their communication activities, heavily utilize computers and network

128

technology. It is assumed that virtually all agency creative professionals are connected to
the Internet via a computer work station in their ofﬁce, and the results were improved
when the researcher had an e-mail address of a creative director. E-mail reminders
produced almost instantaneous activity by stimulating responses typically within hours.

The telephone also provided an assist to recruitment, because it enabled the
researcher to directly contact the creative-director gatekeepers. Creative group
coordinators or managers were also an excellent point of contact, which should be kept in
mind by future researchers in this area. These administrative support personnel were
often easier to reach than creative directors, and they were inﬂuential in directing the
researcher to the right person within the agency.

To get better information that reﬂects the operant social norms with advertising
agencies, it is imperative that the cooperation of agency management be obtained. When
this occurred, the researcher was more successful in gaining participation of the targeted
participants. Methods, however, need to be found to gain access to large agency
organizations. Only one of the Top-10 agencies, ranked by gross income, participated to
any signiﬁcant extent, meaning more than one or two responses. These large agency
networks employ a large number of copywriters and art directors, and they represent a
huge potential for more representative, more insightﬁrl research. These large agencies,
too, could be expected to have more entrenched social values, which would make them
richer sites for analysis. The best way to get a more complete study of social norms
inside an advertising agency would be to obtain its management’s permission to
physically walk around the ofﬁces and ask every copywriter and art director to participate,

but this is impractical for a cross-sectional quantitative study of any scope. Access to

129

agencies would also allow for the measurement of the outcome stage of the creative
process. Advertisements could be judged for their novelty, appropriateness, and
unexpectedness. Social norms for creativity can be measured against the number of
concepts generated. Personal evaluations could be made as to the outcomes of job
satisfaction and mastery.

Work also could be conducted to examine the dimensions of social norms for
creativity more fully. For example, the dimensions of strength and consensus may seem
similar, but they are not parallel, at least ﬁom a theoretical perspective. The difference is
best illustrated by a matrix (Table 61). Low strength and low consensus should indicate
weak inﬂuence of social norms (quadrant 3). Oppositely, high strength and high
consensus should indicate strong inﬂuence of social norms (quadrant 2). There also may
be situations where there is high consensus or agreement as to the values for social norms,
but these norms may not be held very strongly (quadrant 1). Last, there may be situations,
where peOple in a group strongly hold a number of norms, without much agreement as to
which one should be the primary value (quadrant 4). A sample would have to be

constructed that identiﬁed agencies in each condition.

Table 61: Comparison of Strength and Consensus Dimensions

 

 

1. High Consensus 2. High Consensus
Low Strength ‘ High Strength
Consensus .
3. Low Consensus 4. Low Consensus
Low Strength . High Strength
Strength

130

Similarly, the dimension of strength could be contrasted with the dimension of
conditionality (Table 62). Social norms may be highest in quadrant 4, when they are low
in conditionality (more universally applicable) and high in strength. The second level
situation would be when social norms are high in both conditionality and strength,
meaning that the norms are strongly valued, but they may not apply all of the time
(quadrant 2). Low levels of social norms may apply in most or all circumstances

(quadrant 3) or a few or isolated circumstances (quadrant 1).

Table 62: Comparison of Strength and Conditionality Dimensions

 

 

1. High Conditionality ‘ 2. High Conditionality
Low Strength High Strength
Conditionality .
l
3. Low Conditionality 4. Low Conditionality
Low Strength High Strength
1
Strength

Conditionality may also be contrasted with consensus (Table 63). Social norms
should be most apparent under high consensus and low conditionality (quadrant 1).
Moderate levels should occur where there is high consensus and high conditionality

(quadrant 2), where there is widespread agreement on the primary norms, but they do not

Table 63 : Comparison of Consensus and Conditionality Dimensions

 

1. High Consensus ! 2. High Consensus
Low Conditionality High Conditionality
Consensus i
3. Low Consensus 4. Low Consensus
Low Conditionality l High Conditionality

 

Conditionality

131

apply in all situations. Social norms should be least evident in situations with low
consensus and either low or high conditionality (quadrants 3 and 4).

The theoretical effects of the three dimensions together are described in Table 64
which represents a cubed matrix in a ﬂat form. Logically, social norms should be most
apparent when there is high strength, high consensus and low conditionality (square 7).
The next level would be when there is high strength, high consensus and high
conditionality (square 8). The lowest level of social norms would be when there is low

strength, low consensus and high conditionality (square 3).

Table 64: Summary of Theory for Three Dimensions of Social Norms

 

1. Low Strength 2. Low Strength 3. Low Strength ’ 4. Low Strength
Low Consensus High Consensus Low Consensus High Consensus
Low Conditionality1 Low Conditionality High Conditionality : High Conditionality
5. High Strength 1 6. High Strength ! 7. High Strength I 8. High Strength
Low Consensus i Low Consensus ; High Consensus High Consensus
Low Conditionality High Conditionality Low Conditionality High Conditionality

To more fully understand the creative process within advertising agencies, more
work needs to be done in regards to understanding the interaction between effects at the
individual level, the team level and the agency level. The interactions between levels in
this study were for the most part insigniﬁcant or inconsequential; however, the issue of
non-independence will have to be more ﬁrlly explored. How can the variance between
individuals be separated from the variance due to agencies? This will require larger and
more complete samples of data with a larger percentage of potential number of
respondents per agency. It would be beneﬁcial to know more about the sources of
inﬂuence to better understand how social norms work and how they can be inﬂuenced.

Obvious sources are the creative director, agency management, clients, peers, and others

132

in the advertising industry. Which sources are most inﬂuential and why? How do
changes in social norms occur, and what drives that change? These questions most likely
would require qualitative method, such as case studies, to gain a deeper understanding of
social norms for creativity.

A question or concern about the study was that its results did not concur with
previous studies in regards to the effect of synergistic extrinsic motivation on intrinsic
motivation and the effect of intrinsic motivation on the creative process (see Amabile,
1996). The absence of correlations involving intrinsic motivation may have been due to
the high level and narrow deviation of intrinsic motivation (M = 6.01, SD = .80) that
created little variance to correlate with the other variables. Where does the cause for this
difference lie? Did the method fail to provide a diverse sample in terms of motivation?
Are advertising-agency professionals inherently more motivated than people in other
studies? Stuhlfaut (2006), however, found that advertising people were not signiﬁcantly
different in their level of intrinsic motivation. If social norms for creativity do not affect
intrinsic motivation, does this mean that intrinsic motivation is a trait or a stable
individual characteristic? In a study cited earlier in this work, Ryan and Deci (2000)
concluded that intrinsic motivation could be increased by positive feedback given in a
non-controlling manner that imparted useful information. Social norms for creativity
could be viewed in this manner. Creative work that is done in accordance with norms
should receive such positive feedback. What were the circumstances about this survey to
this respondent pool that caused a lack of relationship between SNC and intrinsic
motivation? Again, was it just the lack of variance in the level of intrinsic motivation, or

was this symptomatic of a bigger issue? More work needs to be done to investigate the

133

discrepancies between the effects in this study and previous studies involving motivation
and creativity.

More work also needs to be done on scales that measure synergistic and
nonsynergistic extrinsic motivation in advertising. The standardized alpha for synergistic
extrinsic motivation was .57 and the standardized alpha for nonsynergistic extrinsic
motivation was .62. This same issue was also expressed by Amabile (1996) who
provided the basis for the scales used in this study. Perhaps additional items could be
developed, so the scales would contain more than ﬁve items each.

This study examined the effects of social norms on the creative process through
the lens of motivation, using the intervening variables of intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation, because the investigation used and extended the work of Amabile and the
componential model of creativity. More could be done, however, by examining the
effects in the context of other moderators. For example, research could study the effects
through the prism of structure. Rigid structures could be expected to have strong social
norms, while ﬂexible structures should tend to be less restrictive. Taking another view,
how do social norms for creativity mesh with an agency’s mission or strategic goals? Or,
how does the organizational overall climate for creativity work to promote or inhibit

certain values about what is and is not creative?

Conclusion
This research added signiﬁcant knowledge to the study and practice of creativity
in advertising by applying theories and concepts from other disciplines. It lent its weight
to the argument that creativity in advertising is not just an individual process of

inspiration; it is a social process with inherent values, judgments and inﬂuence. What

134

was learned by this study also has application beyond advertising to other creative
endeavors in other ﬁelds, because the creative process is fundamentally a universal
phenomenon that operates in all organizations; and therefore, social norms for what are

and are not creative standards in other ﬁelds must also exist.

135

APPENDICES

136

APPENDIX 1: SOLICITATION MATERIALS

Letter on MSU Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing Department letterhead

Date

Name
Address

Dear (name),

I would like to include the copywriters and art directors on your staff in a national survey
of advertising creativity. After 24 years in the business as a copywriter, I’m at MSU
earning a Ph.D in advertising. . .yes, it’s true. . .there is one. As part of my dissertation
research, I’m conducting a national online survey to ﬁnd out what copywriters and art
directors think about creativity and how their views affect the creative process. I would
appreciate it greatly if you would ask your staff to take an online survey. It will only take
about 10 minutes of their time. I think you and they will ﬁnd it thought provoking.

Please ask your art directors and copywriters to go to:
http://research.adv.msu.edu/ss/wsb.dll/Stuhlfaut/creativityhtm

It’s important that as many people within your department participate as possible,
because I’m interested in group—level data. But please make sure everyone knows their
participation is voluntary. Any information they provide will not be attributable to them.
All the data will be averaged together. I’d be glad to share the general results and the
overall results from your agency with you. It may help you push the boundaries of
creativity in new ways.

I would really appreciate your help. If you have any questions, you may contact me at
stuhlfau@msu.edu or call 1-517-646-0713. Thanks.

Sincerely,

Mark Stuhlfaut
Michigan State University

PS: Enclosed is suggested copy that you may use to send an e-mail or memo to your staff.

137

E-mail to creative directors

Subject: What is or is not creative

After 24 years in the business as a copywriter, I’ve gone back to Michigan State
University to get a Ph.D in advertising. Now I’m conducting research for my dissertation,
and I’d appreciate your help. I would like to have all of the copywriters and art directors
on your staff complete a short online questionnaire. It will only take about 10 minutes of
their time. I think they will ﬁnd it interesting.

Below is suggested copy for you to use in an e-mail. Please ask your art directors and
copywriters to go to http://research.adv.msu.edu/ss/wsb.dll/Stuhlfaut/creativity.htrn

It’s important that as many people within your department participate as possible,
because I’m interested in group-level data. But please make sure everyone knows their
participation is voluntary. Any information they provide will not be attributable to them.
All the data will be averaged together. I’d be glad to share the general results and the
overall results from your agency with you. It may help you push the boundaries of
creativity in new ways.

I would really appreciate your help. If you have any questions, you may contact me at
stuhlfau@msu.edu or call 1-517-646-0713. Thanks.

138

Suggested e-mail text provided to creative directors

To everyone in the creative department:

The creative department has been asked to participate in a National Study of Creativity in
Advertising. It’s about what we think about what is and is not creative. Please go to
http://research.adv.msu.edu/ss/wsb.dll/smjgrﬂmeaﬁww.hm and complete an online
survey. It should only take about 10-15 minutes of your time.

To get the most representative results for our agency, we encourage everyone to
participate; however, please understand that your participation is completely voluntary.
We won’t know who did or did not participate. No proprietary, conﬁdential or personal
information is requested. Any opinions you provide will be held in the strictest
conﬁdence by the researchers. We will only receive results that have been combined, so
no answers will be attributed speciﬁcally to anyone.

It is important not to bias your answers or the answers of others. Therefore, please do not
discuss the questions or your answers with others until you and they have completed the
questionnaire.

Thanks for your help.

139

APPENDIX 2: INSTRUMENT
National Survey of Creativity in Advertising

This is the National Survey of Creativity in Advertising to ﬁnd out what people like you
think about what is creative and what is not creative. Your participation is very important
and much appreciated. You should be able to complete the survey easily in about 15
minutes. Before starting the study, please read the following statement.

STATEMENT OF CONFIDENTIALITY AND CONSENT

Your participation in this study is completely voluntary. You may end your participation
at any time, and you may refuse to answer any particular question within the survey. All
information that you provide will be held in strict conﬁdence. The information that you
provide will be tabulated so that it cannot be attributed to you in any report of the
research’s ﬁndings. Only the researchers involved in this study will have access to the
raw information. Your privacy will be protected to the maximum extent allowable by
law.

If you would like to receive a copy of the study’s general results, please provide your
name and e-mail address in the boxes at the end of this questionnaire. Please be assured
that your name and contact information will be separated from the other information you
provide and placed in a separate ﬁle, so that none of your opinions and information you
provide can be attributed to you.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this study, please contact Mark
Stuhlfaut, the student researcher on this project, at Michigan State University, 517-355-
5084, stuhlfau@msu.edu, or Dr. Bruce Vanden Bergh, Department of Advertising, 309
Communication Arts Building, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan,
48824, 517-355-2314.

Further, if you have any questions or concerns regarding your rights as a participant in
this study, you may contact (anonymously if you wish) Peter Vasilenko, director, Human
Research Protection Program, by phone (517-355-2180), fax (517-432-4503), e-mail
(irb@ores.msu.edu), or regular mail (202 Olds Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824.

Please indicate your voluntary agreement to participate by clicking on the NEXT PAGE
button below.

(NEXT PAGE)

140

National Survey of Creativity in Advertising

Please provide your answers by clicking on one button for each answer below. DO NOT
USE YOUR BROWSER’S BACK OR FORWARD BUTTON TO MOVE FROM
SCREEN TO SCREEN, because you may lose your selections. Just use your mouse to
click and scroll. There are ﬁve sections. At the end of each section, please click the
button at the bottom to move on to the next section.

PLEASE DO NOT DISCUSS THE QUESTIONS OR ANSWERS WITH OTHER
PEOPLE IN YOUR AGENCY BEFORE YOU OR THEY HAVE ANSWERED THE
SURVEY. IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOT BIAS YOUR ANSWERS BY THE
ANSWERS OF OTHERS.

1. Within advertising agencies, there may be some common understandings about
WHAT IS CREATIVE in advertising. Thinking speciﬁcally about the agency
where you work now, what would most evegyone in the creative department say
is ONE quality an ad concept needs to have to be called creative?

 

 

 

 

Now, thinking about the above quality, please indicate your agreement with the following
statements.

2. Most everyone in this creative department strongly believes that this quality is
important for an ad concept to be called creative.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Strongly disagree Strongly agree

3. Most everyone in the creative department strongly shares this idea about what is
creative.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Strongly disagree Strongly agree

4. The above idea about what is creative is always expected to apply to every
assignment in the creative department.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Strongly disagree Strongly agree

141

5. How strongly do you agree with most everyone in the creative department about
this quality of what is creative?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Strongly disagree Strongly agree

6. Thinking of your work during the past month, how much did your answer for #1
about what IS creative...

a. Limit the way creative problems were defined?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

b. Limit the way situations were described?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

c. Limit the objective of the assigrnents?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

(1. Direct the way you thought about the creative problem?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

e. Affect the way you sought out additional information?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

f. Affect the way you examined possible solutions?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

7. Now, thinking of your work during the past month, how much did your answer
for #1 about what IS creative affect the following items:

The number of concepts generated
The overall quality of the concepts
The originality of the ads produced
The attention-getting power of the ads
The relevance of the ads

The believability of the ads

The persuasive power of the ads

reap-99'?

Scale:
Signiﬁcantly decreased
Moderately decreased
Slightly decreased
Neither increased or decreased
Slightly increased
Moderately increased
Signiﬁcantly increased

142

SECTION 2 of 5

8. Within advertising agencies, there are often some common understandings

about WHAT IS NOT creative in advertising. Thinking speciﬁcally about
the agency where you work now, what would most evegyone in the creative
department say is something that shows an ad IS NOT creative?

 

 

 

 

Now, thinking about the above quality, please indicate your agreement with the following
statements.

9.

10.

11.

12.

Most everyone in this creative department strongly believes that this quality IS
NOT creative.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Strongly disagree Strongly agree

Most everyone in the creative department strongly shares this idea about what
IS NOT creative.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

The above idea about what IS NOT creative in an ad always is expected to apply
to every assignment in the creative department.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

How strongly do w agree with most everyone in the creative department about
this quality of what IS NOT creative?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Strongly disagree Strongly agree

143

l3.

14.

How much did your answer for #8 about what IS NOT creative:

a. Limit the way creative problems were deﬁned?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

b. Limit the way situations were described?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

c. Limit the objectives of the assignments?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

(1. Direct the way you thought about the creative problem?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

e. Affect the way you sought out additional information?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

f. Affect the way you thought about possible concepts?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

Now, also thinking about your work during the past month, how much did your
answer for #8 about what IS NOT creative affect the following items:

The number of concepts generated
The overall quality of the concepts
The originality of the ads produced
The attention-getting power of the ads
The relevance of the ads

The believability of the ads

The persuasive power of the ads

were???

Scale:
Signiﬁcantly decreased
Moderately decreased
Slightly decreased
Neither increased or decreased
Slightly increased
Moderately increased
Signiﬁcantly increased

144

SECTION 3 of 5

15.

Now, thinking about a print advertisement in a magazine, what would most
evegone in the creative department say is a quality that is important for a
layout to be called creative?

 

 

 

 

Now, thinking about the above quality, please indicate your agreement with the following

statements.

16. Most everyone in this creative department strongly believes that this quality is
important for a layout to be called creative.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Strongly disagree Strongly agree

17. Most everyone in the creative department shares this idea about what is creative
in a layout.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Strongly disagree Strongly agree

18.

19.

20.

The above idea about what is creative in a layout always applies to every
assignment.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Strongly disagree Strongly agree

How strongly do ygq agree with most everyone in the creative department about
this quality of what is creative in a layout?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Strongly disagree Strongly agree
Thinking about your work during the past month, how much did your answer

for #15 about what is creative in a layout:

a. Limit the way creative problems were deﬁned?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

b. Limit the way situations were described?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

145

c. Limit the objectives of the assignments?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

d. Direct the way you thought about the creative problem?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

e. Affect the way you sought out additional information?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

f. Affect the way you thought about possible concepts?
Not at all 1 Very little 2 3 4 5 6 7 Quite a bit

21. Now also thinking about your work during the past month, how much did your
answer for #15 about what is creative in a layout affect the following items:

The number of concepts generated
The overall quality of the concepts
The originality of the ads produced
The attention-getting power of the ads
The relevance of the ads

The believability of the ads

The persuasive power of the ads

were???

Scale:
Signiﬁcantly decreased
Moderately decreased
Slightly decreased
Neither increased or decreased
Slightly increased
Moderately increased
Signiﬁcantly increased

SECTION 4 OF 5
22. Please indicate the degree to which the following statements are true:

a. I want my work to provide me with opportunities for increasing my
knowledge and skill.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

b. Curiosity is the driving force behind much of what I do.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

146

. It is important for me to have an outlet for self-expression.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

. I want to ﬁnd out how good I really can be at my work.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

. The more difﬁcult the problem, the more I enjoy trying to solve it.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

I enjoy tackling problems that are completely new to me.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

. I enjoy trying to solve complex problems.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

. I feel better about my work when I have more control over the result.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

I feel better about my work when I get clear input on an assignment.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

I feel better about my work when I get bonus for doing well.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

. I feel better about my work when the assignment matches my interests.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

147

l. I feel better about my work when I receive encouragement from my
supervisor.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

m. I feel worse about my work when I’m told it isn’t good enough.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

11. I feel worse about my work when my supervisor watches me closely.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

0. I feel worse about my work when the deadlines are unrealistic.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

p. I feel worse about my work when I don’t think I’m getting the cooperation I
need.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

q. I feel worse about my work when the assignment is rigidly deﬁned.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never true Always true

SECTION 5 of 5

Almost done. Now, just a little additional information is needed to help us categorize
your answers.

23. What is the name of your agency? Note: this question is only asked so all
responses from your agency can be averaged together. Your answer here does
not compromise the conﬁdentiality of your information.

 

 

 

 

148

24. What is your gender?
0 Male
0 Female

25. What is your age?

0 18 to 24

0 25-29

0 30-34

0 35-39

0 40-44

0 45-49

0 50-55

0 55—59

0 60+

26. How long have you worked at your current agency?
0 Less than 1 year
0 1 year
0 2 years
0 3 years
0 4 years
0 5 years
0 6 years
0 7 years
0 8 years
0 9 years
0 10 years or more

27. How long have you worked in advertising at any agency?
0 Less than 1 year
0 1 year
0 2 years
0 3 years
0 4 years
0 5 years
0 6 years
0 7 years
0 8 years
0 9 years
0 10 years or more

149

28.

29.

30.

What is your primary creative responsibility?
0 Art direction

0 Copywriting
O Other

 

If you selected other, please specify:

About how big is your agency in terms of number of employees?
0 1 - 20 employees
0 21-50 employees
0 51-99 employees
0 100-199 employees
0 200+ employees

If you would like to receive a copy of the results of this survey, please enter your
name and e-mail address. If not, please see the end paragraph and submit the
survey. If you choose to provide your name and e-mail address, please be
assured that, before any data is analyzed, your name and address will be
separated from your previous answers, so no data can be attributed to you.

First name:

31. Last name:

32.

E-mail address:

Thank you for completing the survey. Please click the SUBMIT button below to
record your answers and close this window. You will be directed to a short
statement that tells you more about the purpose of the study.

150

Follow-up Purpose Statement

The Purpose of the National Survey of Creativity in Advertising

The research in which you have just participated was designed to investigate the extent to
which people within creative departments of advertising agencies have common values
for what is and is not creative. The research was also interested in how much these values
affect the creative process and how much they affect motivation to work. If we can
become more aware of the self-imposed limits to creativity, perhaps this insight will lead
to new thinking that opens up the creative process. If you have any more questions or
would like to talk further about the study, please contact Mark Stuhlfaut at

stuhlfau@msu.edu. Thank you for your participation in the study.

151

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