Creative Thinking Profile Inventory

Abstract

The Creative Thinking Profile Inventory (CTP), developed by Johnathan R. Cromwell, Jennifer Haase, and Gergana Vladova (2023), is an empirically validated psychometric measurement tool designed to evaluate individual preferences across three distinct modalities of creative cognition: divergent thinking, bricoleurgent thinking, and emergent thinking. Grounded in contemporary theories of cognitive styles, creative problem-solving, and organizational improvisation, the instrument addresses a critical gap in psychometrics by moving beyond ability-based testing to measure subjective stylistic inclinations in idea generation. The inventory consists of 15 self-report items administered on a 7-point response scale ranging from 1 (Not at all) to 7 (An extreme amount). Psychometric evaluation across adult samples confirms a robust three-factor latent structure via exploratory factor analysis (explaining 40% total variance: 19% divergent, 12% bricoleurgent, and 9% emergent) and confirmatory factor analysis demonstrating superior model fit (χ² = 218.35, df = 87, χ²/df = 2.51, CFI = 0.955, RMSEA = 0.069, SRMR = 0.063) compared to rival unidimensional or two-dimensional structures. Internal consistency is exceptionally strong, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients reaching α = 0.91 for divergent thinking, α = 0.91 for bricoleurgent thinking, and α = 0.80 for emergent thinking. Convergent validity is evidenced by significant positive correlations with intrinsic motivation orientation, creative self-efficacy, creative personal identity, growth mindset, and social risk-taking (r = 0.41 to 0.73, p < .001), as well as theoretical divergences against personal need for structure and fixed mindsets. The inventory provides substantial utility for organizational psychologists, educators, design researchers, and managers seeking to diagnose creative inclinations, assemble complementary problem-solving teams, and align cognitive task demands with individual creative profiles.

Keywords

Creative Thinking Profile, Bricoleurgent Thinking, Divergent Thinking, Emergent Thinking, Idea Generation, Cognitive Styles, Creative Problem-Solving, Psychometrics, Entrepreneurial Bricolage, Scale Validation

Authors

The Creative Thinking Profile Inventory was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by an interdisciplinary team of researchers specializing in entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and digital innovation:

• Johnathan R. Cromwell, Sc.D. — Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy, and International Business, School of Management, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA. Correspondence: [email protected].
• Jennifer Haase, Ph.D. — Research Group Leader and Senior Researcher, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin, Germany. Specializes in human-AI interaction, digital creativity, and psychological testing methodologies.
• Gergana Vladova, Dr. — Head of Research Group, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society and University of Potsdam, Berlin/Potsdam, Germany. Focuses on workplace learning, knowledge management, and cognitive dynamics in socio-technical systems.

Purpose

For several decades, creativity research within differential psychology was heavily dominated by maximum-performance cognitive ability testing. Instruments such as the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) and Guilford’s battery of divergent production tasks evaluated creative capacity primarily along quantitative indices of fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. While valuable, these paradigms frequently treated creative thinking as a monolithic cognitive capability or reduced it solely to divergent ideation. Consequently, researchers frequently neglected the qualitative, stylistic preferences that individuals naturally deploy when encountering complex, ill-defined, or open-ended challenges.

The primary purpose of the Creative Thinking Profile Inventory is to capture and measure individual preferences across three fundamentally different creative thinking styles: divergent thinking, bricoleurgent thinking, and emergent thinking. Rather than estimating whether an individual can be creative under artificial laboratory constraints, the scale establishes how a person prefers to approach problem-solving, explore conceptual spaces, and execute the ideational phase of creative endeavors. Cromwell, Haase, and Vladova (2023) developed this instrument to test how congruence between a person’s preferred creative style and the structural constraints of a task impacts their underlying motivation, engagement, and final creative output.

The instrument fulfills several key objectives across basic and applied domains:

• Theoretical Resolution: Disentangling classic divergent ideation from pragmatic material reconfiguration (bricolage) and organic, discovery-based process navigation (emergence).
• Organizational and Team Diagnostic: Enabling human resource specialists, design thinking facilitators, and engineering leaders to assess the cognitive diversity within teams. By diagnosing whether members lean toward brainstorming large solution spaces (divergent), repurposing existing tools and constraints (bricoleurgent), or iteratively evolving ideas through situated action (emergent), teams can optimize their division of labor across different project phases.
• Educational and Pedagogical Development: Allowing educators and executive coaches to cultivate self-reflective metacognition among learners. Students and professionals can identify their default creative styles, leverage their natural strengths, and intentionally practice alternative styles when situational affordances demand it.
• Person-Task Fit Research: Providing empirical scholars with a concise, reliable instrument to explore how task structure, environmental uncertainty, and resource scarcity interact with cognitive preferences to predict state intrinsic motivation, flow, and subjective well-being.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the Creative Thinking Profile is operationalized as a multidimensional cognitive style. In cognitive and organizational psychology, a cognitive style reflects habitual, pervasive, and preferred modes of perceiving, remembering, organizing, processing, and transforming information. Cognitive styles are distinct from intellectual abilities; abilities refer to the capacity or level of cognitive performance, whereas styles signify consistent qualitative preferences for how that capacity is deployed. The inventory models creative ideation through three distinct stylistic dimensions:

1. Divergent Thinking Style (Items 1–5)

The divergent thinking dimension reflects an individual’s explicit preference for expanding the conceptual search space by generating a vast quantity and variety of novel possibilities. Rooted in the psychometric traditions of J.P. Guilford and Mark Runco, this style favors exploratory cognitive breadth over immediate depth. Individuals scoring high in this dimension prefer to generate multiple hypotheses, brainstorm broadly before selecting an approach, view obstacles from diverse theoretical angles, and deliberately prevent premature cognitive closure. In an operational context, an individual with a high divergent thinking preference will typically resist adopting the first viable option, insisting on laying out a wide landscape of alternatives to guarantee that non-obvious possibilities are thoroughly explored.

2. Emergent Thinking Style (Items 6–10)

The emergent thinking dimension assesses a preference for organic, non-linear, and discovery-driven creative development. In contrast to upfront deliberate planning or expansive pre-solution brainstorming, emergent thinking relies on situated action, where problems and solutions co-evolve through ongoing engagement with the task. Drawing on concepts from reflective practice, improvisation, and dynamic system interaction, individuals with an emergent orientation allow solutions to arise gradually as an artifact of ongoing exploration. They favor continuous cognitive adaptation, conceptual evolution, and post-hoc synthesis over pre-structured blueprints. A practitioner characterized by emergent thinking often starts with minimal predetermined architecture, relying on intuitive insights, contextual cues, and reflective dialogue with materials to reveal the optimal direction.

3. Bricoleurgent Thinking Style (Items 11–15)

The bricoleurgent thinking dimension captures an individual’s preference for pragmatic improvisation, resource-constrained tinkering, and inventive reconfiguration using materials and concepts that are immediately at hand. The construct synthesizes anthropological and entrepreneurial theories of bricolage with cognitive problem-solving. Rather than waiting for optimal, purpose-built tools or seeking an exhaustive search space, the bricoleurgent thinker embraces environmental constraints, repurposes discarded or existing resources, and combines seemingly disparate local elements into viable, functional solutions. This style is characterized by experiential tinkering, practical workarounds, and agile opportunism. In startup settings, rapid prototyping labs, or acute crisis management, bricoleurgent thinking constitutes an essential problem-solving asset.

Theoretical Framework

The Creative Thinking Profile integrates foundational concepts from cognitive style theory, structural problem-solving frameworks, anthropology, and self-determination theory into a coherent structural taxonomy.

Cognitive Styles and Creative Problem-Solving Models

For decades, cognitive style in creativity was largely examined through bipolar continuums, most notably Michael Kirton’s Adaption-Innovation (KAI) theory. Kirton posited that individuals vary between preferring to do things better (adaptation) versus doing things differently (innovation). However, multidimensional cognitive frameworks have increasingly demonstrated that creative behavior cannot be adequately reduced to a single linear axis. The Creative Thinking Profile advances this paradigm by articulating three separate, non-mutually exclusive cognitive styles that correspond to distinct epistemic mechanics during idea generation:

• Conceptual Expansion (Divergence): Originating from Guilford’s (1967) Structure of Intellect model, divergence represents the outward movement of thought away from conventional schemas. It relies on extensive spreading activation across semantic memory networks to build novel associative linkages.
• Situated Co-Evolution (Emergence): Grounded in Donald Schön’s (1983) theory of the “reflective practitioner” and Kees Dorst’s design research paradigms, emergent thinking views creative cognition not as a purely internal mental computation, but as an interactive, situated feedback loop between the actor and the environment. Cognitive schemas are continually updated through experiential enactment.
• Constrained Synthesis (Bricolage): Originating from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1962) sociological treatise The Savage Mind and formalized in organizational theory by Baker and Nelson (2005), bricolage involves “making do by applying combinations of the resources at hand to new problems and opportunities.” Cromwell et al. (2023) translated this macro-level behavioral phenomenon into a distinct individual-level cognitive problem-solving orientation termed *bricoleurgent thinking*.

Self-Determination Theory and Person-Task Fit

A central theoretical premise underpinning the CTP is the interaction between cognitive style and task affordances, informed by Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Cromwell, Haase, and Vladova hypothesized that intrinsic motivation—a vital prerequisite for high-level creative achievement—is maximized when the cognitive demands embedded within a task’s structure align with an individual’s internal creative thinking profile. When a bricoleurgent thinker is placed in a resource-constrained, practical environment, their experience of competence and autonomy flourishes. Conversely, forcing an emergent thinker into rigid, pre-planned linear protocols induces cognitive dissonance, depleting intrinsic motivation and inhibiting creative output.

Validity

The psychometric validation of the Creative Thinking Profile was conducted using rigorous quantitative methodologies across adult cohorts, demonstrating strong convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

To establish convergent validity, Cromwell et al. (2023) examined the associations between the three CTP dimensions and established psychological constructs known to influence creative behavior:

• Divergent Thinking Style: Demonstrated robust, statistically significant positive correlations (ranging from r = 0.41 to 0.73, p < .001) with intrinsic motivation orientation, creative self-efficacy, creative personal identity, growth mindset (Dweck), and social risk-taking. Concurrently, it manifested expected negative correlations with personal need for structure (r = -0.18 to -0.26, p < .001) and fixed mindset constructs, confirming that individuals who prefer divergent search actively reject cognitive rigidity and premature certainty.
• Bricoleurgent Thinking Style: Exhibited an empirical profile highly convergent with divergent thinking, showing strong positive alignments with creative self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and practical improvisational confidence. It maintained positive associations with openness to experience while displaying unique associations with practical problem-solving pragmatism.
• Emergent Thinking Style: Exhibited distinct psychometric properties compared to divergent and bricoleurgent styles. While retaining moderate positive correlations with creative self-efficacy, emergent thinking demonstrated a lower reliance on upfront ideational fluency and distinct patterns of association with need for structure, reflecting its reliance on tolerance for ambiguity, patience, and iterative unfolding rather than energetic brainstorming.

Predictive Validity and Criterion Measures

The predictive utility of the inventory was tested by examining how stylistic preferences interact with task conditions to forecast subjective and objective performance outcomes. Cromwell et al. (2023) demonstrated that each specific thinking style became a significant, dominant predictor of overall task enjoyment, psychological engagement, and subjective creative output when the experimental task’s underlying constraints matched that style. Specifically:

• Under conditions requiring open-ended ideation without immediate physical constraints, the divergent thinking subscale significantly predicted heightened task engagement and perceived creativity.
• When tasks featured severe resource limitations and pre-existing physical components, the bricoleurgent thinking subscale emerged as the primary positive predictor of intrinsic motivation and creative task satisfaction.
• In unstructured tasks characterized by ambiguous outcomes requiring iterative development, the emergent thinking subscale uniquely predicted sustained engagement and task enjoyment.

Reliability

The Creative Thinking Profile demonstrates high internal consistency across all three subscales, exceeding standard psychometric thresholds for research and diagnostic instruments.

Internal Consistency

Reliability estimates reported by Cromwell, Haase, and Vladova (2023) demonstrate that the five-item subscales possess strong internal homogeneity without redundant item content:

• Divergent Thinking Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was calculated at α = 0.91, indicating exceptional internal consistency and shared latent variance across the items.
• Bricoleurgent Thinking Subscale: Yielded an identical coefficient of α = 0.91, demonstrating robust inter-item correlation and precision in assessing bricolage preferences.
• Emergent Thinking Subscale: Demonstrated strong reliability with a Cronbach’s alpha of α = 0.80. Given the nuanced, process-oriented nature of emergent cognition, an alpha of 0.80 across five items reflects an optimal balance of internal consistency and construct breadth.

Composite Reliability and Measurement Error

In addition to traditional Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, structural modeling verified that composite reliability (CR) metrics for each latent factor comfortably exceeded the recommended 0.70 benchmark. Average Variance Extracted (AVE) estimates supported adequate construct reliability, confirming that the measurement error associated with individual indicators remains low relative to the true construct variance.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the 15-item inventory was thoroughly vetted through both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, supporting the hypothesized tripartite framework.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial exploratory factor analysis using oblique rotation (such as Promax or Oblimin, acknowledging theoretical correlations between creative dimensions) extracted three clear, distinct latent factors:

• Factor 1 (Divergent Thinking): Accounted for approximately 19% of the total variance, with all five divergent items exhibiting high, clean primary factor loadings (> 0.65) and negligible cross-loadings.
• Factor 2 (Bricoleurgent Thinking): Accounted for approximately 12% of the total variance, capturing all five items associated with resource improvisation and material repurposing.
• Factor 3 (Emergent Thinking): Accounted for approximately 9% of the total variance, grouping the five items assessing organic development and iterative adaptation.
• Cumulative Variance: Together, the three extracted factors explained approximately 40% of the total variance in the latent item space.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analysis conducted on an independent validation sample confirmed the fit of the proposed three-factor correlated measurement model. Utilizing standard goodness-of-fit benchmarks established by Hu and Bentler (1999), the three-factor model yielded excellent structural metrics:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom Ratio: χ² = 218.35, df = 87, χ²/df = 2.51 (well below the traditional threshold of 3.0, indicating acceptable model parsimony).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.955 (exceeding the standard 0.95 cut-off for outstanding model fit).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.069 (falling well below the 0.08 upper boundary for acceptable approximation error, with acceptable confidence intervals).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): 0.063 (comfortably below the 0.08 criterion, confirming minimal residual correlation).

Comparison with Rival Nested Models

To substantiate that the three styles are statistically non-redundant, Cromwell et al. tested alternative structural representations:

• One-Factor Model: Collapsing all 15 items onto a single general creative style factor produced a substantially degraded fit (CFI < 0.80, RMSEA > 0.12), demonstrating that creative style cannot be represented unidimensionally.
• Two-Factor Model: A model combining divergent and emergent thinking into a single generative factor while keeping bricoleurgent thinking distinct yielded fit indices significantly worse than the three-factor solution (Δχ² was statistically significant at p < .001).

These findings confirm that divergent, bricoleurgent, and emergent thinking represent empirically distinct, psychometrically separable dimensions of creative cognition.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Creative Thinking Profile is structured as follows:

• Test Type: Original psychometric self-report inventory.
• Administration Format: Standardized paper-and-pencil or computerized/electronic survey administration.
• Target Population: Adults (aged 18 years and older), including undergraduate students, corporate professionals, entrepreneurs, designers, and creative industry workers.
• Number of Items: 15 items in total, divided equally across three discrete subscales:
• Divergent Thinking Subscale: Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Emergent Thinking Subscale: Items 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
• Bricoleurgent Thinking Subscale: Items 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type intensity scale:
  • 1 = Not at all
  • 2 = Very little
  • 3 = A little
  • 4 = Moderately
  • 5 = Much
  • 6 = Very much
  • 7 = An extreme amount
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Calculate the mean score for each subscale by summing the numerical ratings of the corresponding 5 items and dividing by 5.
  • Divergent Thinking Score = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3 + Item 4 + Item 5) / 5
  • Emergent Thinking Score = (Item 6 + Item 7 + Item 8 + Item 9 + Item 10) / 5
  • Bricoleurgent Thinking Score = (Item 11 + Item 12 + Item 13 + Item 14 + Item 15) / 5
  • Scores on each subscale range continuously from 1.00 to 7.00. Higher scores denote a stronger subjective preference for that particular thinking style.
  • Reverse Scoring: There are no reverse-coded items in this instrument.
• Interpretation: The CTP can be interpreted either as an ipsative profile (examining the relative hierarchy of styles within an individual) or normatively (comparing an individual’s score on a dimension relative to sample norms). A multi-modal profile is possible, where an individual exhibits high preferences across multiple styles (e.g., high divergent and high bricoleurgent).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Creative Thinking Profile was officially published in 2023 in the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Individual Differences.

• Permissions: The scale may be utilized free of charge for non-commercial academic research, empirical investigations, and pedagogical/teaching applications. In accordance with academic licensing and fair use standards, researchers must properly cite the original publication by Cromwell, Haase, and Vladova (2023).
• Fee: There is no fee required for academic or scientific use.
• Commercial Use: Commercial implementation, inclusion in proprietary organizational consulting batteries, or monetization within corporate software applications requires formal permission from the primary corresponding author and copyright holder.
• Contact: Dr. Johnathan R. Cromwell ([email protected]).

References

The following works provide the empirical and theoretical foundations for the Creative Thinking Profile:

• Baker, T., & Nelson, R. E. (2005). Creating something from nothing: Resource construction through entrepreneurial bricolage. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(3), 329–366. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2005.50.3.329
• Cromwell, J. R., Haase, J., & Vladova, G. (2023). The creative thinking profile: Predicting intrinsic motivation based on preferences for different creative thinking styles. Personality and Individual Differences, 208, 112205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2023.112205
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
• Dorst, K., & Cross, N. (2001). Creativity in the design process: Co-evolution of problem-solution. Design Studies, 22(5), 425–437. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0142-694X(01)00009-6
• Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill.
• Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118
• Kirton, M. (1976). Adaptors and innovators: A description and measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 61(5), 622–629. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.61.5.622
• Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962). La pensée sauvage [The savage mind]. Librairie Plon.
• Runco, M. A. (2010). Divergent thinking, creativity, and ideation. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (pp. 413–446). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511763205.026
• Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.

Items of the Scale