A Twisted Pair: Solitude and Network Centrality as Creativity Drivers

This exploratory paper seeks for novel social networks explanans of individual creative performance. Building upon emerging interdisciplinary theory of social networks and personality, this study introduces a new dimension and potential driver of creative performance as embodied by preference for solitude. We claim that when engaged in creative task, people tend to rely primarily either on internal resources rooted in their personal traits, vision and skills; or on extrinsic resources, here represented by the richness of social network. By entwining intrinsic and extrinsic factors, we propose an integrated model of creativity in social networks. We test our hypotheses on the sample of engineering department of a large Russian company operating in gas machinery industry. Findings majorly support our main proposition. Our results also demonstrate that collaborative environment affects negatively both people with high and low preference for solitude. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.