Creativity, Learning Goal and Self-Construal: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

Creativity, Learning Goal and Self-Construal: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

Cultural individualism-collectivism has a positive impact on independent self-construal, which in turn has a positive impact on creativity and mastery goal orientation. To test this theoretical model of behavior, 186 Chinese undergraduates from Singapore (a collectivistic culture) and 158 Caucasian undergraduates from Australia (an individualistic culture) were recruited to complete a survey, which contained the following measures: independent self-construal scale, mastery goal orientation scale, Torrance Test of Creative Thinking and What Kind of a Person are You? LISREL 8.0 was used to analyze the fit of the data to the theoretical model of behavior. It was found that cultural individualism-collectivism has a positive and significant impact on independent self-construal (γ= 0.26, p＜0.01); independent self-construal has a positive and significant impact on creativity (β= 0.82, 2＜0.01); independent self-construal has a positive and significant impact on mastery goal orientation (β = 0.52, p＜0.01); and creativity and mastery goal orientation is positively and significantly correlated, r = 0.43, p＜0.01. With regards to the overall fit of the theoreticcal model to the empirical data, χ² (25, N = 344) = 74.96, p ＜ 0.001. Although this result suggests that the hypothesized model is not plausible, the significant χ² may have been distorted by the large sample size in this study, which has the effect of increasing the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis. Other indices were used to gauge the fit of the theoretical model to the empirical data. It was found that Goodness-of-Fit Index (GFI) = 0.96; Adjusted GFI (AGFI) = 0.92; Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = 0.94; and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = 0.076. These results provided empirical support for the theoretical model of behavior.