Creative utterances about person-centered care among future health care professionals are related to reward dependence rather than to a creative personality profile.

BACKGROUND

Creativity can be defined as the creation of something that is novel, useful, and valuable for society (i.e., high-level creativity) and/or everyday life. In this context, people have implicit theories of creativity as being either non-malleable (i.e., a fixed creative mindset) or malleable (i.e., a growth creative mindset). Our aim was twofold: (1) to test an improved creative mindset priming paradigm (i.e., adding high-level/everyday creativity perspectives and using an organizational important task) by assessing if participants used different ways to answer to the prime and (2) to analyse the relationship between personality and creative utterances regarding an important topic in participants' future professions.

METHOD

Students (

RESULTS

The fixed versus growth condition was predicted (

CONCLUSION

We argue that the paradigm successfully primed participants to write about creativity and person-centered care using narratives with different semantic content. However, individuals' ambition to be socially accepted, rather than creative personality traits, elicited the utterances about person-centered care. The creative mindset priming paradigm presented here along language processing methods might be useful for measuring creative potential at work. We suggest that if health care personnel's notions of the activities related to care are generated from their drive to be socially accepted and not from a truly creative profile, the activities might be self-serving and not person-centered.