Measuring the construct of public sector creativity: Development of a validated scale

Abstract

Public sector creativity—public servants coming up with novel and useful ideas—is the origin of solutions and innovations central to public sector organizations' ability to optimally serve society's interests. Despite its relevance and argued limitations, an adequate scale and framework to assess public servants' creativity remained absent. Using three quantitative (n = 2434/n = 1157/n = 621) and two qualitative datasets, this state-of-the-art preregistered study provides a novel, valid, reliable, comprehensive but succinct multidimensional measurement tool allowing detailed assessment of states and changes of public servants' creativity by academics and practitioners. To aid academics and practitioners' understanding of the scale and public sector creativity, it also provides a supplementary theoretical framework in line with the data structure of the scale that compresses and structures extant theory on creativity while emphasizing what is indicated as important in the public sector. The findings shed light on the nature of public sector creativity as an aggregate and multidimensional construct.