The Relationship between Creative Personality Composition,Innovative Team Climate,and Team Innovativeness: An Input — Process — Output Perspective

This study investigates the relationship between creative personality composition, innovative team climate, and team innovation based on an input‐process‐output model. We measured personality with the Creative Person Profile, team climate with the Team Climate Inventory, and team innovation through team‐member and supervisor reports of team innovativeness. The personality composition in each of 29 teams in a television production company was operationalized by mean scores for each creative personality variable, as well as the combination of different creative personality variables within a team. The team climate variable “vision” mediated the relationship between the mean level of associative orientation in teams and team innovation. The team climate variable “support of innovation” mediated the relationship between the joint variables of mean level of ambition x mean level of motivation and team innovation. The results indicated that when there are relationships between creative personality composition and team innovativeness, they are mediated by an innovative team climate.     

Tracing the Path from Personality — via Cooperativeness — to Conservation

Ecological behaviour is often conceptualized as an instance of cooperating in a social dilemma situation. Thus, it has been argued to relate to dispositional tendencies of moral virtue and pro‐social orientation. To embed such notions in models of basic personality, we herein predicted that the recently proposed sixth basic personality factor, Honesty–Humility — which specifically pertains to individual differences in cooperativeness — is linked to environmental attitudes and ecological behaviour. Results from two studies (N = 137 and N = 531, respectively) supported these hypotheses and showed that Honesty–Humility explains incremental variance beyond the remaining, more classical five factors of personality. In addition, mediation analyses revealed that Honesty–Humility exerts part of its influence via individual differences in pro‐social value orientations. Individual tendencies to cooperate in social dilemma situations could thus be shown to form a bridge between basic personality dimensions and ecological behaviour. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Dynamics of Creative Teaching

The following is a qualitative portrait of a creative teacher and her teaching process. Over a period of six months, five interviews were conducted with the teacher before, during, and following a university course in teacher education on instructing diverse learners. Additional interviews were conducted with six students at the beginning and end of the course and with the teacher's husband following the course. Additional data sets include classroom observations revealed in field notes, personal memos, and course materials. The overarching themes represented constructs involving intense and thorough course preparation, teacher‐student connections, and reflective teaching. Sub‐themes guiding the process of creative teaching emerged including constraints placed on preparation and reflective teaching, an awareness of self and students within the process of preparation and connection, feedback from colleagues and students guiding the connection and reflective teaching, and the values and goals formed from personal history and philosophy of life shaping all three major themes. This case study of creative teaching possesses characteristics resembling creative acts in other domains (e.g., art, literature, physics, economics) and presents a model for the education of future teachers.     

Client Quest—A Key to Counseling

The expression quest is proposed to represent any unifying theme of client purposes. Counseling is then defined as an interview in which client quest is superordinate to counselor quest. It is suggested that client quests be classified by their direction. Thus, quests may be for understanding or change, and, at a higher level, for mastering self or environment. The identification, clarification, and management of client quests becomes central to effective counseling. Ideally, as an expert in human learning and development, the counselor is a hypothesis maker who works with his client to facilitate conquest. Dissonance is said to occur when the purposive balance is inappropriate to counselor or client quests. The congruent counselor reduces dissonance by discussing changes in the purposive balance openly with the client and by avoiding professional roles in which client quests are subordinated.