Temperament, Personality, and Creativity: A Literature Review
This literature review investigates the relationship between temperament and creativity, two constructs that resist precise definition but have been linked through multiple empirical studies. Drawing on research by Necka and Hlawacz, Batey and Furnham, Helson, and Puryear and colleagues, the paper identifies personality traits — including openness to experience, independence, emotional stability, and risk-taking — that appear to predict creative potential. The review also highlights the mediating role of profession, noting that artists tend to show stronger temperament–creativity correlations than bank officers. The paper concludes by applying these findings to a practical hiring strategy for a videogame design company, arguing that recruiting for personality rather than skills or experience may yield more consistently creative employees.
- Introduction and Definitions: Defining temperament and creativity using key sources
- Measuring Creativity and Its Challenges: Why creativity remains difficult to measure reliably
- Temperament and Creativity Across Professions: Artists vs. bank officers in temperament–creativity studies
- Traits of the Creative Personality: Personality traits linked to high creative potential
- Practical Significance and Application: Applying findings to personality-based hiring strategies
- References: Full citations for all sources consulted
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper anchors an abstract discussion in concrete examples — comparing artists and bank officers — which gives the theoretical claims tangible grounding.
- Multiple definitions of both key terms are presented and evaluated before one is adopted, demonstrating careful scholarly framing.
- The review moves purposefully from broad conceptual discussion toward a practical application, giving the argument a clear direction and real-world relevance.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies comparative synthesis: rather than summarizing each source in isolation, it groups findings from multiple studies around shared themes (e.g., personality traits common to creative individuals) and notes where authors agree or diverge. This approach produces a coherent argument rather than a list of annotations.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with dual definitions of each key term, then addresses the measurement problem that complicates all temperament–creativity research. It moves into empirical findings, first on professional contexts, then on specific creative traits. A final applied section bridges theory to a workplace hiring strategy. The structure follows a classic funnel: broad concept → empirical evidence → practical implication.
Introduction and Definitions
In seeking to establish the relationship between temperament and creativity, it is prudent to define both terms at the outset. It should be noted, however, that neither term carries a single universally agreed-upon definition. Temperament, in the words of Necka and Hlawacz (2013), could be "conceptualized as the biologically rooted, mostly inborn, foundations for personality and other individual traits" (p. 183). Hilda and Sneha (2017), on the other hand, define temperament as "an individual's characteristic level of emotional excitability or intensity" (p. 803). As the authors further point out, an individual's temperament becomes apparent some weeks after birth. Temperament is thus understood as a biological and largely innate dimension of individual difference that precedes the full development of personality.
When it comes to creativity, the focus is on the individual's ability to formulate ideas that can be deemed original. Creativity is therefore also concerned with innovation and imagination. A more precise definition is offered by Parkhurst (as cited in Batey and Furnham, 2006), who defines creativity as "the ability or quality displayed when solving hitherto unsolved problems, when developing novel solutions to problems others have solved differently, or when developing original and novel (at least to the originator) products" (p. 359). These are the definitions of creativity and temperament adopted throughout this review. It is also important to note that in this discussion, personality and temperament are used largely synonymously, consistent with the literature reviewed.
Various studies have been conducted in an attempt to chart the relationship between personality and creativity. In one such study, it was found that creativity can be predicted and explained via certain personality traits (Batey and Furnham, 2006). The five-factor model of personality has frequently served as a framework for such investigations, with openness to experience emerging as the dimension most consistently linked to creative behavior.
Measuring Creativity and Its Challenges
Despite the volume of research in this area, creativity remains an elusive concept as far as developing a full understanding is concerned. Batey and Furnham (2006) attribute this, in part, to the significant challenges encountered in measuring creativity reliably. Puryear, Kettler, and Rinn (2017) support this view, stating plainly that "creativity is a complex construct" (p. 1). More specifically, they observe that "despite the large amount of research relating creativity and personality, conceptions or measurements of creativity as an influence on this relationship have not been a common frame for studies" (Puryear, Kettler, and Rinn, 2017, p. 4).
It therefore follows that, given the complexity of creativity measurement, personality constructs that seek to define the correlation between temperament and creativity are largely founded on speculation. Some of the approaches used in the past to measure creativity include autobiographical instruments, among others. The validity and reliability of some of these methods is well-established, while others have proved less successful. This inconsistency in measurement is a recurring limitation in the literature and must be kept in mind when interpreting findings across studies.
Temperament and Creativity Across Professions
In their study assessing the relationship between temperament and creativity among bank officers and artists, Necka and Hlawacz (2013) found that within the artist group there was a positive correlation between the activity temperamental trait and creativity. Conversely, they established a negative relationship between emotional reactivity and creativity within the same artist group. Importantly, "bank officers, who were generally less creative than artists, showed no relationships between creativity and temperament" (Necka and Hlawacz, 2013, p. 183).
The relevance of these findings cannot be overstated. They indicate that the relationship between temperament and creativity may be mediated by the profession an individual occupies. In other words, the development of an individual's creative potential could be modulated by his or her role in life. The question of why artists would generally be more creative than bankers finds a partial answer in another study, where artists were found to be not only less likely to embrace group norms but also more emotionally stable (Batey and Furnham, 2006). There is sufficient evidence to suggest that these characteristics function as precursors to creativity.
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