What is the relationship between creativity and rebellion?

Posted on July 08, 2021 by Korey Peters, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Creativity is related with receptivity to new ideas, risk-taking, and being self-directed, according to research on creative people. Do these characteristics put creative people at conflict with their culture and their peers? Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it is no.

Assume Jeremy is a creative child who performs below average in school. Teachers and parents may regard him as a poor student because he “daydreams” and performs poorly on objective assessments. His latent abilities as a right-brain thinker may go unnoticed and undeveloped.

Consider Alycia, a high school teacher who works in a constrained environment. She is eager to explore novel teaching methods, but her colleagues are conservative in their approach and even hostile to her ideas. What options does she have?

There is no doubt that creative people would struggle in too regimented organisations and will become irritated with jobs that are not difficult. This explains why creative children frequently struggle in school, with their right-brain brains wandering as their left-brain teachers try to force them to retain facts that these creative youngsters instinctively regard as useless or minor to understanding the “big picture” in life.

When creative people enter the workforce, their situation frequently worsens. They may end up in a career that is not well suited to their individual talents and gifts if they do not choose their occupation properly. Unfortunately, individuals may discover this the hard way if they are bored and frustrated at work.

However, the work itself may not be the issue. It could also be the social environment of the workplace. Every workplace has its own identity, which evolves and changes organically over time. Some workplaces value innovative ideas and risk-taking, creating a stimulating environment for a creative, risk-taker. Other environments are more strict and traditional, which can be frustrating and lead to conflict and discontent.

Some work groups, according to social psychologists, suffer from groupthink, which is the tendency for some groups to feel superior to others and to dismiss any evidence to the contrary. These organisations place a high importance on conformity and are resistant to new ideas. Coworkers who encourage this type of environment will make an innovator feel lonely and rejected.

These coworkers frequently follow an unspoken code when it comes to persons who are unusual or stand out from the pack. They convey both overt and subtle rejection signals to a creative coworker who presents new ideas. These signals include disregarding a person’s views, delivering perfunctory, fake applause, or worse, threats and scorn for proposing ideas that undermine the group’s perceived integrity.

Many people at work become accustomed to their daily routines, and over time, they defend these patterns as sacred. These people frequently follow the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but they overuse this approach, and to them, nothing is ever truly “broken,” and to suggest differently is to jeopardise the comfort of their work routines. These individuals may react venomously to creative and risk-taking coworkers who threaten their “comfort zone” by proposing new methods of doing things.

All of this suggests that creative people will frequently clash with those around them and be dissatisfied by rigid and unbending work environments and organisational structures. This is due in part to the fact that creative people are drawn to novelty, new ideas, and new ways of doing things, and their creative minds are frequently producing alternatives to accepted practises.

The cumulative consequences of these difficulties at school, work, or in any other context may lead some creative people to rebel against rules and authority. When this happens, it can lead to irritation and anger on both sides, resulting in a downward cycle caused by interpersonal conflict and disagreement. This dissatisfaction may result in a career shift or disciplinary action at work, an undesirable effect of creative people failing to integrate successfully into the professional environment.

These harmful expressions of rebellion can only be prevented if organisations and individuals are made aware of the interpersonal dynamics that differentiate distinct personality types. One popular method is for coworkers to take the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory and discuss the results with one another. While this test may not be rigorous in terms of standard statistical measurements of reliability or validity, it serves the larger objective of opening the door to addressing interpersonal reaction patterns and respecting each other for these variances.

In sociological terms, workplace diversity is often described by categorising people into black-and-white groups such as gender, race, and age. In the meantime, other key personality and interpersonal distinctions, such as creativity, rarely receive the same level of attention. Nonetheless, one of the most significant dimensions is creativity, because innovation and risk-taking are critical attributes for organisational health and survival.

To avoid the traps of blind rebellion and open confrontation, firms must do a better job of discovering and fostering creative workers, as well as nurturing creativity and respect for creativity in all of their employees. This is not to say that common group practises like “brainstorming” are always an effective way to foster creativity. Creative people are frequently distinct from their coworkers in a variety of ways, including interpersonal differences, inner-directedness, and work habits. These stylistic and substantive discrepancies must be handled in an open and comfortable manner.

Creative people must also be trained to understand themselves and recognise that they have unique needs that can only be addressed in certain ways. They may thrive as artists, entrepreneurs, or in other fields that value openness, risk-taking, and quirkiness. This implies that our educational system must be more responsive to the requirements of creative children and provide ways for creative children to learn that are appropriate for their learning styles.

Individuals and society will gain when schools and workplaces are more educated on creativity and are in a better position to integrate creative people into the community. And children like Jeremy will be more likely to attain their full potential, while adults like Alycia will be able to improve their work environment by bringing in novel and challenging ideas.