Cognitive and Affective Influences on Managerial Creativity

Managerial skills and being Creative are two abilities that individually and together in the form of managerial creativity became very pivotal and its importance was realised more than ever before as once-working solutions proved futile during COVID times. Managerial creativity is influenced by the learned behaviour resulting from socio-cultural influences and the belief system about the outcome contingency emerging from such learned behaviour. Formal education responsible for shaping the learned behaviour influencing the gender roles and belief system or locus of control may independently or in interaction become crucial for developing the much-needed ability of managerial creativity. There is paucity of researches exploring this aspect hence this paper explores the influences of the Stream of study, Gender and their interaction, influence of the Stream of study, Locus of Control and their interaction on managerial creativity. The sample of 288 Higher Education male and female students belonging to management, education and science streams was selected from colleges situated in Indore and the University Teaching Departments of D.A.V.V. using a stratified sampling technique. The tools used were the locus of control scale developed by Rotter and the managerial creativity Test developed and standardised by the researcher. Data were analysed using Two Way Analysis of Variance. The findings show managerial creativity was independent of the interaction between the stream of study and locus of control, whereas the stream of study and gender individually and in interaction significantly influenced managerial creativity. The implications of the findings have been discussed.