The Relationship between Thinking Styles and Creativity of High School Principals

Subject Areas : Creativity and innovation from psychological, epistemological, educational and pedagogical

Ezatollah  Ghadampour ¹ (استادیار دانشگاه لرستان (نویسنده مسئول). [e-mail])
Niloofar  Kogani ² (کارشناسی ارشد مدیریت آموزشی. [e-mail])
Hasan  Jafari ³ (دانشجوی دکتری مدیریت آموزشی، دانشگاه شهید بهشتی. [e-mail])

Received: 2016-06-28 Accepted : 2016-06-28 Published : 2015-01-21

Keywords: Creativity, thinking styles, high school principals,

Abstract :

Background: Managers have a crucial role on qualitative and quantitative improvement of their outputs, that is, the students. Every organization’s creativity is dependent on the creativity of its managers. Different factors influence managers’ creativity. According to Sternberg, intelligence, personality and thinking styles effect creativity. Purpose: This research attempted to investigate the relationship between high school principals’ thinking styles and creativity in the city of Khorramabad. Method: The research design is of the correlation characteristic of descriptive researches. The research population included all 145 high school principals in Khorramabad (67 females and 78 males). To determine the sample size the Cochran formula was used. Therefore, 107 principals (48 females and 59 males) were selected as the sample using a relative cluster sampling. To collect data, Sternberg-Wagner’s thinking styles questionnaire and Ran sip’s creativity questionnaire were administered. The content validity was used to determine the validity of the measures and Cranach alpha was used to measure the validity of the questionnaires. The Cranach alpha values for the thinking style questionnaire and creativity questionnaire were 0.90 and 0.92, respectively. Result(s): Results showed that legislative and judicial thinking styles were positively correlated to the principal’s creativity, while the relative between the executive thinking style and principals’ creativity was not significantly meaningful. Of the thinking styles, the judicial style is a suitable predictor of the principals’ creativity.    Conclusion: According to the findings, can be concluded that the thinking style, fundamentally role in innovation and depending on the situation, one of these styles, the best results will be achieved.