**1. Introduction**

There has been increasing discussion about the need for more creative thinkers in business and industry [1]. Florida [2], Schlee and Harich [3], and others have advocated the need to cultivate a creative workforce, to develop innovative thinkers that can address complex 21st century problems and challenges.

The fact that creativity is perceived as being variable, inimitable and subjective, has often made it vulnerable to being marginalized in education—since traditional educational structures are often based around certainty, grades, and single-answer thinking. Yet, creative thought processes are necessary criteria for accomplishment in our complex, interdependent society [4]. Globalization has led to exponential increases in knowledge and technology. This has implications for education—especially in business fields, which thrive on the need to innovate, problem solve, and nimbly shift with societal moves. Daniel Pink [5] illustrates the heightening value of creative abilities, stating:

Today, the defining skills of the previous era—the "left brain" capabilities that powered the Information Age—are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous—the "right brain" qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning—increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders. (p. 3)

Given the popularity of business education as a field of study, and the need for creative thinking in the business workforce, it is important to consider the intersection of creativity and business education. Boulocher-Passet et al. [6] encourage initiatives for creativity in business schools, and specifically note that there are few existing studies that teach creativity to business students with the aim of leveraging student perception on creativity. There are many good reasons to support the promotion of creative thinking in business contexts or training, and the rationale for this has been established by existing literature, organized around the ways that creativity addresses problems and sustains economic development [7–9], supports human wellness and expression [10,11], and builds productive confidence [12,13]. In this article, we focus on this issue of creativity in business education in a literature review around theories of creative self-beliefs and the potential of arts-based methods in business.

The objective of this paper is to explore and review key literature around theories of creative potential and performance—which includes creative identity, creative mindset, and creative self-efficacy. We begin by defining what we mean by creativity. Plucker et al. [14] note that one of the common weaknesses of creativity research and scholarship has been a problem of lack of definition, with only 38% of articles about creativity in academic journals even providing any working definition at all. Thus, we seek to ground our ideas in a common perspective on the construct. We build upon theories from education and psychology which discuss the importance of supporting creative capacity. We relate these ideas to creative self-beliefs—including creative mindset, creative identity, and creative self-efficacy. Further, we focus on the use of arts-based methods in business education and training as being one of several important approaches to building creative confidence and capacities. We provide some current and future directions for research in this area, and describe an in-progress research intervention, as an example of an approach that seeks to enhance creative capacity (through arts-based and other methods) among international business program students.

#### **2. Defining and Grounding Creativity as a Construct**

Creativity is an ancient construct, ye<sup>t</sup> formal research on the concept has only been prevalent since the latter half of the 20th century [15]. While creativity is thought of as a subjective term, most research around it defines it as having several core components. First, a creative idea, process or product is novel—it brings something into play that either did not exist before or, at least, is relatively new for its context. Cropley [16] asserts, however, that a novel idea with no potential use cannot be taken as "creative", because novelty does not guarantee that something will be effective [17,18]. So, the most common definition suggests that creativity is a process of coming up with designs, artifacts, objects, programs, or ideas that are both "novel" (original, new, fresh, etc.) and "effective" (useful, productive, or of some value to others). Another key characteristic, according to Sternberg and O'Hara [19], involves "task appropriateness." Creative things (ideas, products, processes, artifacts, experiences, etc.) are sensitive to the context and domain they are created within. Mishra and Koehler [20] term this third construct as 'wholeness'—involving the contextual aspects of creative work, or how well it is fit to that work's specific purpose or context. From both a business and an educational perspective, in these constructs of novelty, effectiveness, and wholeness (NEW), creativity fits well with the goals of effective learning and improvement [21].

The problem of creating learning experiences that are novel (or relatively so, in an instantiation of a course), effective, and whole in business education, is that the variety of business contexts we may be teaching for are subject to variability and change.

Thus, we may not always fully understand what the goals, settings, outcomes, or challenges look like—in order to try to teach students to readily produce creativity in novel, effective, and whole products or ways of doing things. It may be more constructive to aim for supporting the development of a creative orientation to the world. In evolving contexts, things change frequently, and we are often dealing with uncertainty and unknowns. This is why we sugges<sup>t</sup> that creativity be instead defined by a focus on a mindset that corresponds with creative thinking, rather than chasing a moving target of novelty, effectiveness, and wholeness, or seeking perfect creativity. If we start by understanding and aiming for the habits of mind or theoretical components that help support creative development across the lifespan, we are better positioned to produce creative thinkers across the wide range of contexts for business education.

We sugges<sup>t</sup> that there is much of value in theories of creative self-belief. This is a broad construct describing an individual's beliefs about their own creativity. Theories under this construct help to explain how the essential predictors of whether individuals are able to think, act, and work creatively depends on their own beliefs about themselves as a creative individual [22]. Beghetto and Karwowski [23] sugges<sup>t</sup> that individuals must feel efficacious or see themselves as creative to actually engage creatively. In managemen<sup>t</sup> literature, there are few studies that focus on how one's beliefs, attitudes, and expectations about creativity might be adjusted to maximize creative performance—so much of the extant literature lies in education or psychology.

Additionally, in grounding ourselves in a creativity worldview, and in defining creativity, we consider certain areas of focus or perspective. In the report All Our Futures by the British National Advisory Committee on Creative and Culture Education [24], Sir Ken Robinson and colleagues introduced three perspectives on creativity. In one, they suggest, "many people associate creativity primarily with the arts ... but creativity is not unique to the arts. It is equally fundamental to advances in the sciences, in mathematics, technology, in politics, business and in all areas of everyday life" [24] (p. 27). Another type of creativity focuses on how people with exceptional creative gifts produce historic theories, inventions, paintings, or compositions—although such creativity is less common. Finally, there is a more democratic definition of creativity that encompasses more people, which is the process of "imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value" [24] (p. 30). According to this democratic definition, which most contemporary creativity scholars support [15], all people can be creative in their work and daily life, even if they do not recognize they are being creative. This perspective on creativity is also essential to education, because without it, it is hard to envision building educative experiences that allow people to develop creatively.

In managemen<sup>t</sup> literature, creativity is not always well defined, but business professor Teresa Amabile's definition is often cited, which suggests that creativity is "the production of novel and appropriate solutions to open-ended problems in any domain of human activity" [25] (p. 18). This definition and most applications in the field of business lean toward a democratic perspective, which suggests that creativity can, and should, be developed by everyone, and acted on as a vital driver for innovation [26].

Thus, we assert that a more democratic perspective on creativity—paired with an aim to support learners in their own beliefs and capacity to act in novel, effective, and whole ways—can be informed by theories of creative self-belief. These theories include creative identity, creative mindset, and creative self-efficacy. In order to better understand the components of creative self-belief, we review several theoretical constructs from educational psychology which we believe may be useful to consider in business education and training. In the following sections, we will delve more deeply into these theories that fall under the heading of creative self-belief.

#### **3. Guiding Approach to the Literature**

In organizing our approach to this review of the literature, we sought to understand common themes and core ideas about creative self-beliefs. We consider: how are creative self-beliefs defined in the literature? More specifically, we consider this question with an eye toward what elements of creative self-beliefs may relate to, or inform, arts-based creativity training.

The notion of self-beliefs is a general construct in psychology that describes individuals' beliefs about themselves, in terms of who they are and where their capacities lie. Research on self-beliefs falls under several theory-driven psychological constructs, including: identity theory [27,28], growth mindset theory [29], and self-efficacy theory [30]. These three theories, though all recent in the history of educational psychology, are each significant explanatory concepts on self-beliefs. Because they are meta-theories, they often function as parent concepts, which have smaller unique branches and niche areas of theory offshoots. Of interest to us and our question are three narrower niche areas of research, looking at how identity, mindset, and self-efficacy intersect with creativity.

In order to examine this, we begin each literature section with a brief overview of the 'parent' theory. We sought to summarize the key points of each parent theory based on primary sources. The aim here is to give the reader a brief overview of the landscape of each theory construct, followed by a more detailed look at the creativity-focused branch of that theory. Each parent theory is too broad to be reviewed in a single article. However, more specific areas of intersection with creativity are narrower, as well as more recent and niche, making it possible to examine them in enough depth to understand the basic scope.

We engaged a search of each theoretical branch of creative self-beliefs. Our sources of literature were two given databases, (1) ScienceDirect and (2) Scopus, as these comprise a significant swath of 'mainstream' research papers in English [31].

Tranfield et al. [32] sugges<sup>t</sup> that a methodical search begins with the identification of keywords and search terms, as chosen from the scoping study and the literature, and discussions noted within the review team. The reviewer(s) then choose the search strings that are most appropriate for the study. In this sense, we were able to keep the search relatively straightforward, by using keywords and terms that precisely defined each area, including each of the terms themselves: "creative identity", "creative mindset", and "creative self-efficacy". This yielded articles or studies that specifically referenced the exact theory/terminology within the text. We determined this to be a more appropriate approach for these particular areas than the more expansive Boolean search terms of creativity and identity, creativity and mindset, and creativity and self-efficacy.

We began the initial scoping search with these expanded terms, and found that these produce large volumes of works outside of the scope of each specific theory. For example, the literature search data we display below in Table 1 illustrates the numbers yielded by using the specific theory terms themselves (e.g., "creative mindset"), vs more expanded search (e.g., creativity and mindset).


**Table 1.** Numbers for specific theory terms.

While the more open Boolean search, which did not specify the theory terminology in "quotes", produced greatly more results in terms of pure numbers, it also produced a vast array of unrelated literature that merely contained those terms in the text. By narrowing down to the proper theory terminology, we were able to identify the relevant works on the topic. Thus, our initial list of potential works was drawn from this. Even within those smaller search scopes of exact theory terminology, there were still significant numbers of articles that were not appropriate for inclusion in our discussion that follows.

Thus, our extended search criteria were narrowed to identify only articles that placed these creative self-belief theories as a focus of study, or a core topic. We aimed to look beyond any articles that simply mentioned the terms within the text, or that dealt with them in peripheral ways that offered little in takeaways (e.g., an article that referred to or mentioned "creative identity" would not be included unless it sought to either empirically study the theory, or discuss the concept with some theoretical focus). We were able to narrow our focus to the key articles described in our narrative

review, as many articles that popped up in our keyword search simply mentioned these terms in the text, but focused on other topics.

As we examined each initial search to select out articles that put the construct or concept as a central point or area of study, we identified a more selected swath of research in each area. This makes sense, as each of these creative self-belief concepts has emerged primarily within recent decades, and is a small, but promising, area in the larger arena of creativity research. Thus, each made for a small-scope, but interesting, look at issues of creative self-beliefs. These articles are reported below in each section, which is a more of a narrative than purely systematic type of review, which we explain further.
