Creative Self-Efficacy

In creativity literature, creative self-efficacy is defined as the self-view that one has the ability to produce creative outcomes [62]. When creativity is concerned, some people can perceive creative performance as a threatening and arduous task, especially if they have not built prior mastery in a genre before. As a result, they are less likely to choose activities or settings that push them to be creative.

Other studies have also suggested that higher creative self-efficacy leads to greater creative performance [62]. Empirical work has demonstrated that creative performance is associated with creative self-efficacy at the individual level [63], at the team level [64], and within diverse industries, such as education, operations, manufacturing, financial, insurance services, and research and development [37,64–67].

Creative self-efficacy is considered malleable. It can fluctuate with changes in self, task, or social context-related factors [68], and can be influenced by past performance accomplishments, vicarious experiences, verbal encouragement, and emotional states [61]. Even with such fluctuations and influences, empirical studies demonstrate that creative identity has a positive relationship with creative self-efficacy, even though they operate as two distinct psychological constructs [37].

Some scholars have studied creative self-efficacy as one of the antecedents of innovation within business and organizational contexts, and it has been identified as a key driver of employees' innovative behavior. For instance, Hsu et al. [69] found a significant effect of creative self-efficacy on employees' innovative behavior, and Tierney and Farmer [68] reported that creative self-efficacy was a strong predictor of employees' creative performance over time. Newman et al. [70] examined whether entrepreneurial leadership (an approach characterized by the leader influencing and directing team members to recognize and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities) influences the extent to which employees with different levels of creative self-efficacy engage in innovative behaviors. They sugges<sup>t</sup> that the influence of creative self-efficacy on employees' innovative behavior is stronger for employees who work in a team with strong entrepreneurial leadership because entrepreneurial behaviors motivate employees to derive creative ideas and implement them. In short, the contexts and influences in the workplace—such as a leader's approach—demonstrate the capacity of creative self-efficacy to influence business innovation.

Along similar lines, Jaiswal and Dhar [71] investigated the mediating role of innovation climate and moderating role of creative self-efficacy. Their findings demonstrate that employees with high creative self-efficacy resort to creative behavior when they receive a supportive innovation climate. Thus, creative self-efficacy has a key role to play in the innovative capacity of businesses, and it can be maximized through supportive environments that seek to empower creative behaviors.

Other studies within organizations have also found that an employee's creative self-efficacy has a significant effect on the individual's creative behavior or creative outcomes [62,72]. Richter et al. [73] sugges<sup>t</sup> that a strong belief in one's creative-self extensively motivates individuals to seek consultation and guidance in applying creative behavior.

Bandura [30] has emphasized the reciprocal relationship between creative behavior and creative self-efficacy, yet, there are few studies that investigate the interaction effect of creative self-efficacy in predicting employee creative behavior. Richter et al. [73] also recommended studying the interaction effect of creative self-efficacy. They assert that a strong belief in creative self-efficacy motivates individuals to seek consultation and guidance in applying creative behavior.

Interestingly, the interaction effect between creative self-efficacy and creative behavior suggests that the effect goes both ways, and that engaging in creative behaviors may lead to enhancement of creative self-efficacy, as well. Bandura's self-efficacy theory provides an understanding that cognition associated with creativity plays an important role in the acquisition and retention of behaviors. Thereby, it becomes incumbent on business education to provide opportunities to support creative self-efficacy, if creative behaviors are desired in the workplace.

#### **5. Findings: Bringing Together Creative Self-Belief Theories and Arts-Based Methods**

We have considered several key theories from educational psychology, to better understand the importance of developing creative self-belief in business settings. Theories that deal with creative self-belief—such as identity, mindset, and self-efficacy—emphasize the importance of promoting a sense of the self as a creative person with creative capacity.

Our guiding questions for this literature sought to explore these areas of creative self-belief, with an eye toward how creative self-beliefs may relate to, or inform, arts-based creativity training.

A common finding or narrative of the literature, that ties together each of these reviews of theory, suggests that, for someone to transform their creative potential into creative action, they must have confidence in their ability to act creatively and believe that there is value in doing so. Without this, there is little chance that they will be able to reach their creative potential, or even that they will seek to engage in creative behaviors or creative thinking [22]. Creative self-efficacy was shown to be a driver of innovation in organizational contexts [69–71], but it also deeply connects to creative identity and mindset. This is an important takeaway in reviewing the literature—in noting that these theories often work in reciprocal ways, and work to affect each other within an individual's construction of their own self-beliefs. Any of these areas can be influenced in an individual's psychology by mediating experiences, and a change in one can effect changes in other areas. For instance, bolstering one area, such as creative identity, tends to have an enhancement effect on creative self-efficacy; or, a shift in creative mindset (in terms of one's beliefs about the nature of creativity) can relate to a shift in where creativity falls in one's own identity. Thus, these theories have a synthesizing effect within individuals' creative self-beliefs. This demonstrates the ways that working on developing one area can have relational effects on others. But, more importantly, to truly form a stronger vision of creativity within people's self-beliefs, we must promote or provide educative experiences that seek to enhance or expand each of these theoretical spaces within human psychology.

Thus, creative self-belief theories align to sugges<sup>t</sup> that, if the field of business seeks to promote more creativity from within, there is a need to engage people in educational activities that support creative self-beliefs. While there are many ways to do this, one key approach we sugges<sup>t</sup> and explore further, as follows, is through the integration of arts-based methods.

Arts-based methods, or the incorporation of techniques and processes derived from the arts, have grown in interest in business education and training settings in recent decades [74]. Despite a common misperception that business and the arts have little to do with each other, business can learn from the arts, and successful artists and managers or leaders often share common characteristics—thus, business fields can develop and grow their creative and inventive capacity through connecting to the arts.

This, in some ways, represents a broader aim to cross-fertilize ideas between business and the arts [75]. Along these lines, Formica [76] notes that the most essential and challenging problems in managemen<sup>t</sup> are not technical, but human-centered, in nature. In this, they may be supported by engagemen<sup>t</sup> with creative endeavor and different types of entrepreneurial identity [77]. Taylor and Ladkin [78] describe four different processes or goals in using arts-based methods in business settings. These include *skills transfer* (the development of skills from the arts to improve performance in business settings), *projective technique* (using the arts to reveal inner thoughts and perceptions that may not be otherwise accessible), *illustration of essence* (using the arts to understand the "essence" of an idea), and *making* (using the arts to foster a deeper experience of personal presence and connection to help managers and leaders experience themselves and their world in a more cohesive way).

While all of these four processes, identified by Taylor and Ladkin, could become critical functions of the arts in business, one that may be interesting to consider, when we aim to strengthen elements of creative self-belief, is the *projective technique* process. In this, the act of using art becomes a way to "foster reflection through projection" [78] (p. 58).

There is a relevant connection here to constructions of mindset, albeit not from an educational psychology standpoint, and not in the same sense as "creative mindset" in terms of psychological self-belief theories. Taylor and Ladkin [78] note Langer's contention that "the primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it" [78] (p. 58). In other words, in their conception, making or using art becomes a way to reflect about our own experience, allowing the individual to objectify their world sans limitation or logic already set up by their life. One can view, or make, an object for what it is (fixed mindset) or one can view additional uses and potential that goes beyond the obvious (growth mindset).

This viewpoint is inspired by the work of Paul Crowther [79], who suggests that the aforementioned process is possible because "the creation of artifacts, or engagemen<sup>t</sup> with such artifacts ... enables us to articulate the structures of attention, apprehension, and projection in a way that draws on our cognitive and perceptual capacities operating as a unified field—rather than our intellectual capacities alone" [78] (p. 58).

This idea can also be a way to strengthen creative identity as art objects that people create or engage with can open up a window to the unconscious [80] and, depending on cognitive and perceptional capacities, one can project varied viewpoints, as capacities vary and are colored by past experiences and environmental factors.

When it comes to self-efficacy, however, people's creativity is most often inhibited by fear, negative personal judgement, and chattering of the mind [48]. The key to personal creativity is to eliminate, or at least minimize, these limitations, to allow one's creative essence rather than the ego, false personality, or external self, to project tacit knowledge. This technique indirectly uncovers falsehoods or fixed mindsets, through its creative awakening process. Springborg [81] explored arts-based methods using theories grounded in an embodied view of cognition, and determined that focusing on sensory experience enabled participants to remove judgments about the self and about others. This ability to suspend judgment may have relevance to the concept of the "Voice of Judgment" noted earlier, which must be suspended or silenced, in order for creative identity to flourish.

With respect to managemen<sup>t</sup> literature, the projection technique, as an arts-based method, has been used in various organizational settings, such as to make invisible concepts like "culture" visible [82], or leveraging the tool called Visual Explorer, where individuals choose an image that best depicts a problem, and discuss the issue together to uncover various viewpoints [83], or use LEGOs to build an organizational strategy [84].

In essence, the projective technique relies more on one's "gut feeling" rather than rational thought [78]. By reflecting on and working with the object, the "knowing in the gut" may be intellectualized into "knowing in the head", Arguably, through time this may be a way to build a belief system within an individual that strengthens their own creative capacities.

This illustrates a potential relationship to creative self-belief—and, thereby, to cognitive processes such as creative identity, mindset, and self-efficacy. It directly references how engagemen<sup>t</sup> in the arts is not a one-directional act but, rather, is a bi-directional and symbiotic action of self meaning-making. The act of *reflecting* might also be extended beyond the original intent, into an act of *identity formation*, in which a person (an employee, leader, or manager) can begin to see themselves as having a creative identity through the action of engaging in the arts. In this, they may expand their own creative potential and ability, as suggested by Beghetto and Karwowski [23]. Springborg [85] also explores the idea of leadership as art as a phenomenon characterized by leaders working from their senses, rather than drawing on prior modes of sense-making, and by sense-making as a tactile and sensory process, rather than a solely analytical or cognitive one.

Creative identity and self-efficacy are positively correlated, and tend to increase or decrease together, suggesting that, if people engage in activities that enhance their identity in an area, they will also experience an increase in self-efficacy in that area [37]. As we have noted, Karwowski's work [54] suggests that creative mindset is influenced by these elements, also—it is important that people both view creativity as amenable to growth, learning, and change, and to see it as part of a self-description.

All of these elements of self-belief, taken together, are thus amenable to influence by engaging in the arts. While scholars point out the varied ways that the arts can be valuable in business education, training, and development [78], we emphasize their influence on creative self-beliefs. This aligns with the instrumental goals of business education, toward developing a more creative 21st century workforce. But, it also allows for a more human-centered approach to business, in which employees and students can engage in work that is innately human, productive, and creatively fulfilling, toward becoming more self-actualized and creative people [86].

Despite the growing interest in arts-based methodologies, and work that suggests their value toward developing creativity, several scholars have pointed out that there remains a lack of empirically grounded work in this area [87], and that more attention is needed toward arts-based methodologies in business, to better understand the experiences of participants.

While the practice of arts-based learning in business is growing, there is a need to better understand how this, and other, methodologies might be used to enhance areas of creative self-belief (i.e., identity, self-efficacy, and mindset). To this end, in the next section, we describe the design of an in-progress intervention with arts-based methods, for developing creative self-belief among business students at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at ASU.

#### **6. Current and Future Directions: Enhancing Business Students' Creativity**

The authors are engaged in the execution of an action research intervention focused on student creativity training for students in the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Given that we have discussed creative self-belief theories and proposed their relevance for creativity training in business, we now describe an example of an intervention model we are currently working with. This work will explore the influence of creativity workshops (which include a mix of arts-based and other methods) on business students' perceptions of creative identity, creative mindset, and creative self-efficacy. The project is in progress at the time of writing, so this paper does not focus on data outcomes, but simply concludes by sharing it as an example of an intervention design that explores these creative self-belief constructs in the context of business education and arts-based methods.

This first author of this article is the designer and leader of this project and inquiry, in her role with global recruiting. As a Thunderbird School of Global Management recruiter with eleven years of industry experience, she observed many organizations' lack of understanding of, and appreciation for, fostering creativity via an inside-out approach. Therefore, this project seeks to address this by developing a training program that might address the gap.

The incoming freshman class that are participating in this intervention will graduate into and enter a workforce comprised of over 50% knowledge-work jobs, which will require them to be social, emotional, creative, and relational. This creativity-focused workshop series was designed to empower students to understand the preconditions of being creative, to utilize their talents, education, and life experiences, and to be the change agents they set out to be.

The Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University has been historically recognized for its graduate program, currently ranked 7th in the United States for international business specialty [88]. The prestige of the school's reputation has crossed over to its bachelor's degree programs, as many faculties teach both at the bachelor and master's level. In addition, ASU has ranked number one in the United States for the most innovative university from 2016 to 2018. Freshman students are required to take a 1-credit first-year seminar course at the beginning of their program, and this creativity training/intervention will be part of the seminar.

Currently, Thunderbird's freshman seminar curriculum does not include any explicit course objective to teach about creativity or consider students' creativity as a skillset. Therefore, this project seeks to offer creativity training (incorporating arts-based and other methods), and to also evaluate business students' perceptions about their personal everyday creativity, based on associated variables, i.e., creative identity, creative self-efficacy, and creative mindset theories. The goal is to set the tone and serve as initial steps toward developing students' creative competency throughout the entire program, as students move toward becoming global business leaders; ideally, the training may later be scaled up or infused throughout Thunderbird programs.

#### *6.1. The C3 Innovation Project*

For simplicity, this creativity intervention is called "C3 innovation", based on the three creative self-belief constructs. Within this partially arts-based intervention, we will also seek to collect and evaluate data for the action research purposes of understanding the effects of such training on these self-beliefs (e.g., as part of the project, we will employ a concurrent mixed method research design with qualitative and quantitative data).

The C3 project is designed to (a) evaluate students' perceptions about their personal everyday creativity and (b) empower them with strategies to enhance their understanding of the importance of being creative. The project was inspired by a study from Hass et al. [58], in which they measured fixed and growth creative mindsets, and the relationship to creative self-efficacy and creative identity, to create a model of a more complete picture of people's self-perceived creative competencies. The researchers concluded that these constructs are separate but interrelated constructs, and students with high creative self-efficacy tended to endorse creative growth mindsets.

This project will include three phases: educate (training), survey, and interview. We focus on describing the face-to-face training, as an example of intervention work in this area of arts-based training in business but, also, share a few details of how we will collect data, to reflect the evaluative nature of such work.

#### 6.1.1. Educate Phase

During the educate phase, there are three facilitated workshops every week, focusing first on creative mindset, then creative identity and, finally, creative self-efficacy. Participants will be tasked to learn concepts and participate in methods and tools in each workshop—engaging in some arts-based, as well as self-reflective/reflexive and other creativity training techniques—and working on related homework and supplemental learnings to aid their comprehension. Also, at the end of each workshop, participants will provide feedback.

In the creative mindset workshop, students will be tasked to enhance their neuroplasticity by utilizing arts-based methods. As an example, in one exercise, the students will draw a personal vision statement for the next five years. Another mindfulness exercise will allow them to meditate via repetition of mantras such as "I will live a creative life, I will ... ". Another exercise will allow students to create a personal artistic-digital gratitude journal via Instagram, where they can select any digital images they wish to create into a montage or collage of image-based perceptions of creativity with respect to their own lives, and to share why they are grateful.

In the creative identity workshop, the students will learn how their identity informs ideation. In one exercise, students will list all possible identities connected to them, e.g., brother, student, etc., then they will select a random object provided by the facilitator and come up with as many ideas as possible and discuss. The point is to exchange ideas and see that they are coming up with different ideas because of the identities they assume. Another exercise involves constructing a visual representation to represent a personification of their Voice of Judgment. By creating and objectifying the voice that limits their creativity, students will engage in discussion about how to separate that critical voice from their own self-perception—to manage or control the voice, so it does not deter them from engaging in the creative process. The final exercise is to develop a list of people who motivate them to be successful in every facet of their lives. In other words, this is to develop a counter to the VOJ, as a Voice of Persistence (VOP), i.e., people who they can keep close to persist in developing a creative sense of self.

In the creative self-efficacy workshop, the students will engage in a theatre-based improv game called "yes, and", where they will complete sentences in pairs by adding "yes, and" in the first round. Next, they will say "yes, but" where they will see how such a simple phrase kills ideas during conversations, and how they should be aware of it. Along this same line of theatre technique, they will also engage in another improv game where pairs will share their passion and interests in 30 s, and then sketch out a startup idea in three minutes. The aim of this game is show how easy it can be to ideate and visualize ideas. The final exercise is called the 1, 2, 3 game, where students will number off 1, 2, 3 until somebody makes a mistake. The game will incrementally become harder in further rounds. The point is that posture affects how we feel about making mistakes. In the game, the

students are encouraged to take a celebratory at the end of their routine to celebrate their mistakes and, most importantly, to then reflect on what can be learned in mistake-making to iterate toward their next moves.

#### 6.1.2. Survey Phase

During the survey phase, the participants will respond to three online surveys. The first survey is a post-workshop feedback survey after each of the three workshops, to assess its effectiveness and capture how, or to what extent, these workshops helped students understand creativity and its preconditions related to their creative potential and self-belief. The second survey, offered immediately after the third workshop, will assess their self-perceived everyday creative competencies, measuring the three constructs of creative identity, creative mindset, and creative self-efficacy. The third survey, a retrospective pre-intervention version, administered a week later, will evaluate the same three constructs assessed on the post-intervention survey. The retrospective survey lets students to respond to the same survey items, but they are asked to think back to the beginning of the semester, before the intervention. They rate the items using the same criteria they had learned through participating in the creativity workshops, to avoid a response shift bias.

#### 6.1.3. Interview Phase

During the interview phase, we purposively sample eight to ten students one week after the workshop and surveys are completed. The interviews aim to help us better understand the results of employing such an intervention, through understanding (a) perceived vs real limitations and/or inhibitors/motivators of everyday creativity, and (b) examples of each students' personal everyday creativity before or during college, to inform future iterations of professional development creativity workshops, and (c) to evaluate the intervention and what aspects of the creativity training may be useful to include or adapt in the future.

We share the design of this creativity intervention as an example of ongoing work that seeks to connect constructs related to creative self-beliefs and consider where creativity training, including arts-based methods, may be instantiated in business education, training, and research.

## **7. Conclusions**

We have drawn a connection between calls for a more creative workforce and the potential of arts-based methods in business education, focusing on the importance of theories of creative self-belief, including creative identity, creative mindset, and creative self-efficacy. The popularity of business as a major has steadily risen in recent decades; and there has also been a realization, in popular and scholarly discourse, about the need to develop skills, aptitudes, and inclination toward creativity among employees, leaders, and managers in business. It is incumbent upon business education, professional development, and training, to incorporate methodologies that enhance creative capacity. But this is easier said than done, and it is important to consider methods and approaches—particularly in the arts—toward building creative capacity in business students and employees.

We have asserted that it may be beneficial to consider theories from psychology and education that explain conditions and elements related to thinking, working, and acting creatively. Specifically, in this literature review, we focused on three theoretical constructs related to creative self-belief (or the beliefs that individuals have about their own creativity). By reviewing these theories, we examine constructs that comprise what it means to identify as a creative person, and to value and believe in one's own creative capacity. Literature in these areas points to creative self-belief as a key to unlocking an individual's creative potential, and to the deep interconnections between creative identity, mindset, and self-efficacy, which can be explored and used to enhance individuals' capacity with business education settings. Notably, the findings around these theories imply that they often relate to and affect each other within individual human psychology. Thus, working to expand or bring forward any facet of creative self-beliefs may enhance others. A more cohesive and strong effect may be possible

through interventions that seek to work upon all three theoretical aspects of creativity and self-beliefs (e.g., one example is found in the C3 instance we have shared here).

While there are varied pathways to expanding creative self-belief, one common theme that recurs is in arts-based methods. Richards [89] and others point to the ways that engaging in the arts is valuable toward constructing a creative sense of self and giving people new ways of viewing the world and working, thinking, and acting creatively within it.

Arts-based methods are a vital area of growth in business scholarship and practice, and while much work has already pointed to their potential, many have also pointed to the need to expand theoretical and empirical work in this area. We have shared one example of an intervention project in progress aimed at investigating this area of arts-based and other methods toward creative self-belief. As more work grows in this area, it will be important to consider multiple ways of knowing and understanding the world as a creative person. This is an area in which business and education can inform each other, living and thriving at the crossroads of creativity.

**Author Contributions:** S.H. contributed as author in conceptualization, methodology, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing, and project administration. D.H. contributed as author in conceptualization, writing—original draft preparation, writing—review and editing, and supervision of writing.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** We acknowledge with appreciation the support of Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, which provided the context and opportunity to actualize this work, and the intervention described in this paper. In addition, Ray Buss of Arizona State University deserves thanks for supporting this ongoing work as Dissertation Chair and advisor. Finally, we offer a special thanks to the gues<sup>t</sup> editors of this special issue, Beibei Song, Claus Springborg, and Piero Formica, for all of their efforts to bring forward more work around arts-based learning in business. We also thank the reviewers, including Claus Springborg, who provided thoughtful comments toward the revision and strengthening of this article.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
