Implicit Theories of the Personality of the Ideal Creative Employee

In order to examine implicit theories of the relation between Big-5 personality traits and creativity, this article draws on lexical searches for adjectives in job ads, in particular jobs with a stated creativity (as opposed to a not explicitly stated creativity) requirement. Our findings show that implicit theories of the link between personality and creativity significantly overlap with the explicit relations that have been identified in the creativity literature: Openness to Experience showed the largest positive effect (i.e., job ads that required creativity actually requested adjectives related to Openness more frequently), followed closely by a positive effect for Extraversion. Conscientiousness showed an overall negative effect in an English sample, but showed mixed results in a Danish sample with a negative effect for only a minority of word clusters mainly relating to the dependability component. The results extend the research on implicit theories of creativity into an organizational context.