Factors affecting nursing students' creativity in Taiwan: Exploring the moderating role of creative personality

Background: The relationships between a school's creative climate, students' creative personality, and students' creative thinking have not been explored in the context of nursing students in healthcare schools in Taiwan. Design: This cross-sectional descriptive study examined how both school creative climate and creative personality interact with the creative thinking abilities of nursing students in Taiwan, and whether the students' personality moderates the relationship between the other two variables. Methods: Seventy-four nursing faculties provided subjective assessments of the environment of a healthcare school in Taiwan, as measures of school creative climate. Two hundred forty-five nursing students completed Verbal and Figural Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT-V and TTCT-F, respectively) as measures of creative thinking; the Taiwanese Creative Personality Scale (TCPS) measured their creative personality. Results: Nursing students' total mean scores on the TTCT-V and TTCT-F were 24.41 and 44.50, respectively. The mean scores for subscales of fluency, flexibility and originality on the TTCT-V were 11.03, 7.12 and 6.26, respectively. The mean scores for subscales of fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration on the TTCT-F were 18.78, 11.45, 12.73 and 1.54, respectively. Students' mean score on the TCPS was -0.11 (SD = 4.05), indicating an overall negative creative personality. Pearson's correlation analysis showed the sufficient resources component of school creative climate was positively correlated with the elaboration component of figural creative thinking. However, sufficient resources negatively correlated with the fluency and flexibility components of verbal creative thinking. The SPSS PROCESS macro showed that students' creative personality had a moderating effect on the relationship between the sufficient resources component of school creative climate and students' creativity as reflected by the verbal creative thinking components of fluency (b = -0.62, p < 0.01) and flexibility (b = -0.55, p < 0.01). Conclusion: Our study fills a gap in the literature regarding the interactions between a school's creative environment and personality factors that foster students' creativity. Validated by empirical data, this study's proposed moderation model of creative personality can be used as a guide for influencing nursing students' creativity. Cultivating students' creative personality and developing sufficiently resourced school creative climates may be key to implementing successful creative education in health care schools.