The Temporal Space: The Development and Manifestation of Individual Creativity and its Organisational Relevance

This thesis uses biographical narrative interviews to follow the lives of four individuals who have been successful in a variety of creative careers. It explores the development of their individual creativity through the inter and intra-psychic experiences that have helped or hindered the development of their creativity; how these early experiences manifested in later life and the relevance this has had on their careers and on the organisations they have existed in. The findings show four main states of mind / valences in the enactment of creativity: connecting, disrupting, outsiding and storytelling, and explores how they emerge through the participants’ experiences. There is an exploration of the interconnected relationship of each of these valences and how the participants’ creativity flows between them from the point of initiation to enactment. It also explores the way the participants create a space that invites others to join them in their creativity and how organisations can either give them a space for their creativity to emerge and flourish or become too restrictive for it to be initiated. Finally, this thesis places the findings in the context of existing theories within the psychosocial field of individual and organisational research to consider possible implications for the wider field of study.