Creative Collective Efficacy in Scientific Communities

Abstract Studying collective creativity is critical for understanding how groups, organizations, and communities innovate and progress over time. However, analyzing creativity at the collective level remains an open and challenging issue. We adapt Bandura’s construct of collective efficacy to understand beliefs about collective capacities for creativity among individual members part of scientific groups, organizations, and communities. We describe our preliminary studies on the development and refinement of a collective efficacy scale for creativity, the factor analyses of the scale items, and the validation of the scale in path models. Our collective efficacy scale for creativity can be adapted for use by researchers interested in investigating the creative capacity of other communities of practice.