The Creative Education Foundation (CEF) is pleased to announce the 2024 Ruth B. Noller Research Grant awardee, Andra Toader, PhD. The Ruth B. Noller Grant supports paradigm-shifting research with high potential for impact in the field of creativity, creative education studies, and creative thinking. Ruth was widely known for cultivating the scientific understanding for creative thinking.
She is most famous for the creativity formula Cƒa (KIE) – the interaction between Knowledge, Imagination, and Evaluation generates Creativity.
Andra’s research fits into three streams— creativity and creative problem solving; organizational and team cognition; and business ethics and leadership. Her work on team creative problem solving has shed new light on the role of cognitive diversity for creative teams. Her research has also highlighted the role of leaders in creating ethical teams, especially on the pernicious effects of unethical leadership role models in perpetuating unethical organizational cultures. Currently, she is incorporating complexity and system-based principles in her work on organizational teams and leadership, as well as investigating the fundamentals of individual and collective cognition that support individual and collective creative problem solving.
The Project
The framing of creativity has been largely positive: Creativity enables the creation of useful novelties that benefit the human species. However, researchers have started to draw more attention to a “dark side” of creativity. These researchers contend that creativity offers a cognitive and behavioral flexibility that predisposes a creative person to bend the rules in situations where they might have something to gain. In other words, creativity can be used for perpetuating immoral or illegal behavior and various injustices, so long as it is in the person’s favor to use those skills for their individual, egotistic benefit.
Andra uses a complexity-based lens and examines factors which might tempt the creative individual to behave unethically. Specifically, this research asks: In which circumstances are creative individuals more likely to behave unethically and where will creativity aid individuals to make more, not less, moral decisions? Specifically, she examines the environmental and personal moderators and mechanisms of the effects of creativity, with a focus on moderators which predispose the creative individual to behave unethically (temptations) and moderators which predispose the creative individual to behave ethically (constraints).
The findings of this research will strengthen the literature by helping it move from a unidimensional and somewhat contrived focus on the “dark side” of creativity to a more nuanced understanding of the temptations that creative individuals face in the their work as well as the internal and external resources that they draw on to manage those temptations.