The Effect of Personal Factors on Creativity among Research Officers in Malaysia

Abstract

The subject of employee creativity has been widely discussed in the field of human resource development. A variety of factors that promote creativity among employees have been presented. This study addresses the issue of the development of employee creativity with special attention to creative works among research officers in Malaysia. This study aims to test the effects of individual factors i.e., openness to experience, creative self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and positive affect on the components of creativity i.e., fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. A survey was conducted on 400 research officers working at one of Malaysia’s largest public research institute, with a return of 286 responses. A check on missing data, outliers, and normality analysis was performed. The results of the hierarchical regression analysis confirmed that only a few of the hypotheses developed earlier were supported. Only three out of 16 direct effects of individual factors on creativity were found significant i.e., openness to experience on fluency, openness to experience on elaboration, and creative self-efficacy on originality. It is confirmed that in the Malaysian context, level of creativity is high among research officers, however only certain individual factors found to influence creativity. This suggests that there are several factors based on the Malaysian culture that influence the results which are different from the expected results from the literature. This study also discusses the implication of this study toward understanding the personal factors that affect creativity.