Looking beyond the generation of creative ideas: Confidence in evaluating ideas predicts creative outcomes

Since its inception 15 years ago, creative self-efficacy has been identified as an important predictor of creativity, the generation of new and useful ideas. Over 50 studies examining this relationship suggest a strong, positive correlation. Nevertheless, like most research on creativity, the research on creative self-efficacy has overemphasized its generative aspects and largely ignored the evaluative aspects, both of which are critical to the production of new and useful ideas. To address this, the present effort developed a measure of idea evaluation self-efficacy. Through two studies, evidence is obtained for the construct and incremental validity of this measure. Implications and future research directions are discussed.