Book Review

Review by
Kennon M. Sheldon
Department of Psychology
University of Missouri-Columbia
Edward L. Deci
Department of Psychology
University of Rochester

TERESA M. AMABILE Creativity in Context. Boulder,

CO: Westview Press, 1996. 317 pp.

When The Social Psychology of Creativity was published

in 1983, it defined a new area of inquiry. Although its topic
was creativity, it bore little resemblance to earlier treatises on
that topic, for it shifted the focus from creative individuals to
creative products. A central question for creativity research-
ers became: what conditions in the social environment allow
individuals to generate creative products?
In Amabile’s early work, a creative product was defined as
that which multiple judges agree is creative. That led ipso facto
to the consensual assessment technique, which made this
important new empirical endeavor possible. The first few stud-
ies using that technique were reported in the 1983 book, and
interested readers no doubt thought of many other studies that
could be done to take the work in new directions. The new
book, which is a re-issue of the earlier one, has an update added
to each chapter that summarizes the post-1983 studies that
have in fact taken the work in various of those possible new
directions. The more recent studies concern issues such as:
inoculating children against the undermining of intrinsic moti-
vation and creativity by extrinsic motivators; the social facili-
tation of creativity in groups; factors in the work-environment
that enhance versus hinder creativity; micro-behavioral and
verbal content-coding protocols for analyzing the creative pro-
cess; and the influence of individual differences in motivational
orientations on creative outputs.

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Book Review

The Revised Guiding Amabile’s early work was the intrinsic motivation
Intrinsic Motivation
Hypothesis hypothesis, which states that intrinsic motivation is conducive
to creativity, whereas acting for external rewards tends to reduce
creativity. In the revised formulation, extrinsic motivators are
no longer viewed as necessarily detrimental to creativity.
Instead, Amabile proposes that some extrinsic motivators can
under some circumstances act synergistically with intrinsic
motivation, in the promotion of creativity. These external fac-
tors can contribute by spurring individuals to persist at less
interesting aspects of the creative process, such as gathering
relevant information or evaluating newly generated responses,
in what Amabile referred to as the Preparation and the
Response Validation and Communication phases of the
creative process. Furthermore, using Deci and Ryan’s (1985)
distinction between informational and controlling aspects of
extrinsic motivators, Amabile now argues that extrinsic moti-
vators can even enhance intrinsic motivation, if they bolster
an individual’s sense of competence without connoting con-
trol and diminishing self-determination. Various studies
(Koestner, Ryan, Bernieri, & Holt, 1984; Ryan, 1982; Ryan,
Mims, & Koestner, 1983) conducted in our own labs have pro-
vided support for this general postulate.
Amabile’s analysis of the synergistic potential of extrinsic
motivation is primarily social psychological — that is, she
focuses on factors in the social context that allow rewards to
evoke feelings of competence or mastery, without undermin-
ing self-determination. Such an analysis is theoretically inter-
esting and pragmatically useful, because it provides a basis
for understanding what one can do, while administering
rewards, in order to decrease the likelihood that they will
undermine intrinsic motivation and creativity. Nonetheless, we
believe a strictly social contextual or situation-based approach
does not offer a full account of how extrinsic motivators can
promote or detract from creativity; it is also useful to consider
perceptual processes occurring within the person and the
potential for the person’s perception of extrinsic motivators to
change over time.
Contemporary self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan,
1985, 1991; Ryan, 1995; Ryan & Deci, 2000) provides a devel-
opmental analysis of extrinsic motivation that extends its ear-
lier social psychological analysis (Ryan, Mims & Koestner,
1983) and is directly pertinent to the question of how extrinsic
factors can come to enhance, rather than diminish, creativity.
The analysis points out that different individuals can vary in

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the extent to which they feel autonomous versus controlled

with respect to the same extrinsic motivator, and the develop-
mental process of internalization is theorized to be the basis
through which individuals can become more autonomous in
executing extrinsically motivated behaviors. For example, a
person may change from resisting the response validation or
communication processes, feeling that they are beneath his
or her notice, to a new stance of appreciating the importance
of such drudgeries, feeling a ready willingness to engage in
them. Thus he or she may be a more effective creator. In order
to better illustrate this point, we present a differentiated model
of extrinsic motivation, below.
Autonomous and Self-determination theory specifies four types of extrinsic
Controlled Forms of
Extrinsic Motivation
motivation: external motivation (in which the person acts
primarily because of an external control); introjected motiva-
tion (in which the person pressures himself or herself to act
using threats of guilt or self-esteem contingencies); identified
motivation (in which the person acts primarily because he or
she has identified with the value of the activity); and integrated
motivation (in which the person acts because the behavior is
consistent with his or her integrated sense of self). All four are
forms of extrinsic motivation, because all four involve the
behavior’s being instrumental — whether it be a means of
complying with another’s or one’s own internal demands, or
of attaining a goal that was self-selected and is wholly self-
endorsed. However, the four types of extrinsically motivated
behavior vary in the degree to which they are autonomous
and self-determined, with external motivation being the
least self-determined and integrated motivation being the most
self-determined.
For example, a man may change his baby’s diaper because
his wife will scold him if he doesn’t, because he’ll feel badly
about himself if he doesn’t, because he genuinely values
the baby’s health and hygiene, and/or because the behavior
expresses his broad commitment to be a caring father. In no
case is the behavior enjoyable for its own sake, but in the lat-
ter two cases, according to self-determination theory, it has
been fully internalized. Many studies (e.g., Grolnick & Ryan,
1987; Ryan, Rigby, & King, 1993; Sheldon & Elliot, 1998; Wil-
liams, Rodin, Ryan, Grolnick, & Deci, 1998) have shown that
people will persist longer, learn better, and be psychologically
healthier when their extrinsically motivated activities are more
autonomously regulated.

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Book Review

We suggest that this differentiated analysis of extrinsic

motivation can give further substance to Amabile’s revised
intrinsic motivation hypothesis. Specifically, to the extent that
a person’s extrinsic motivation is of the autonomous (i.e., iden-
tified or integrated) rather than the controlled (i.e., external or
introjected) type, the extrinsic motivation will likely be syner-
gistic with intrinsic motivation in promoting creativity.
What factors promote individuals’ extrinsic motivation
becoming more autonomous? That is, what enables a person
to come to perceive a potentially controlling social stimulus
in a new way? Research indicates that internalization occurs
in part as a function of the amount of autonomy-support ex-
pressed by authorities (Deci, Eghrari, Patrick, & Leone, 1994;
Grolnick, Ryan, & Deci, 1991), that is, the extent to which
authorities take the subordinate’s perspective, provide as much
choice as possible, and provide a meaningful rationale when
choice is not possible. Thus according to this analysis, the
same contextual factors that prevent extrinsic motivators from
undermining situational intrinsic motivation and creativity,
uncovered by Amabile’s research, also promote the long-term
internalization of extrinsic motivations. For example, an
invested but autonomy-supportive teacher may finally convince
the promising art student that self-promotion is, at least to some
extent, important and valuable.
Individual On page 5, Amabile states that, “. . . within studies of internal
Differences and determinants [of creativity], there has been an implicit con-
Social Influences
cern with ‘genetic’ factors to the exclusion of contributions from
learning and the social environment.” This implies to us that
what is needed is greater attention to the individual differences
that can arise as a function of social learning. The develop-
mental analysis of extrinsic motivation provided by self-
determination theory offers, we argue, a means by which such
individual differences can be conceptualized, and more gener-
ally, a means for integrating the person-centric and the
situation-centric views of creative motivation.
Notably, Amabile and colleagues have themselves begun
to assess individual differences in motivational orientations,
using the Work Preference Inventory (Amabile, Hill, Hennessey,
& Tighe, 1994; also discussed in Amabile’s revised book). The
scale measures enduring personality tendencies to be intrinsi-
cally motivated and extrinsically motivated, consistent with our
suggestion that motivation is a ’state of mind” as well as being
strongly influenced by social context. This is indeed an
important step. However, because the WPI does not distinguish

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between autonomous and non-autonomous forms of extrinsic

motivation, it may miss important aspects of people’s endur-
ing personalities that support creativity. It is in this sense that
the differentiated conception of extrinsic motivation offered
above might supplement the important addition of individual
differences to Amabile’s analysis of creativity.
Extraordinary Amabile notes that most of her research has dealt with
Creativity
“ordinary” creativity. Participants engage in a relatively simple
task (such as haiku or collage) for a short period of time, and
the creativity of the resulting products is examined as a func-
tion of various experimental or individual difference factors.
She argues, perhaps correctly, that ordinary creativity is cote-
rminous with the “extraordinary” creativity evidenced by indi-
viduals whose important ideas emerge or crystallize over
the course of decades. However, remaining to be done is an
analysis of the evolution of ground-breaking works and bril-
liant careers based on the developmental interplay of intrinsic
and extrinsic motivation.
One of the most important questions to be addressed in
that analysis concerns how an individual can maintain the
motivation to become established in a field, and then persist
over time to make major creative advances, even though the
social environment does not accept (and may even shun) the
individual’s initial outputs. Work that is ’beyond the cutting
edge” is often ignored, if not actively ridiculed.
The concept of autonomous extrinsic motivation may be
crucial to understanding the persistence of great creators. To
the extent that beginning careerists have developed autono-
mous extrinsic motivation they may be able to persist in spite
of the difficulties, uncertainties, and drudgeries they are likely
to face prior to making their breakthroughs or gaining their
long-deserved recognition. This important issue could be
explored with archival research, perhaps via content-coding
systems in which, for example, creators’ diary entries were
rated for the presence of intrinsic and the various types of
extrinsic motivation.

CONCLUSION It strikes us that a book review is interesting only to the extent

that it not only points out the strengths of a work but also high-
lights directions in which the research program might fruitfully
move. It is in this spirit that we have provided comments on
some of the many strengths of Amabile’s excellent, updated
text, and have also offered additional possibilities for extend-
ing the work even further. We conclude by reiterating that the

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Book Review

current book should serve for many years as an extremely

important scholarly resource on creativity research, both for
the casual reader who wonders what is known about creativity
and for the serious researcher who wants to move the field in
new directions by formulating his or her own empirical questions.

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Preference Inventory: Assessing intrinsic and extrinsic motivational
orientations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66,
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DECI, E. L., EGHRARI, H., PATRICK, B. C., & LEONE, D. R. (1994).
Facilitating internalization: The self-determination theory perspective.
Journal of Personality, 62, 119-142.
DECI, E. L., & RYAN, R. M. (1985a). Intrinsic motivation and self-
determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.
DECI, E. L., & RYAN, R. M. (1991). A motivational approach to self: Integration
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limits on children’s behavior: The differential effects of controlling versus
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RYAN, R. M., RIGBY, S., & KING, K. (1993). Two types of religious
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