Investigating the relationship between philosophic mindedness and degree of creativity among faculty members of Islamic Azad University (IAU), Zanjan Branch1

This study aimed at investigating the relationship between philosophic mindedness and degree of creativity among faculty members of Islamic Azad University (IAU), Zanjan Branch. To quantify philosophic mindedness, some indices have been used namely comprehensiveness, contemplation, and flexibility whose relationship with the degree of creativity have been analyzed in this study. The population of the study was comprised of 440 faculty members of the aforementioned university, out of which 210 people were selected using stratified random sampling. Data were collected administering creativity and philosophic-mindedness questionnaire with validity indices of %81 and %80, respectively. Both descriptive and inferential statistics indices were applied to analyze the data. To analyze the collected data, we applied some statistical characteristics such as abundance, mean and standard error and to study the relation between variables, we employed correlation coefficient and in order to compare means among grouping variables such as gender and field of study, we used independent T test. The findings of the study indicate that there is a significant relationship between philosophic mindedness and degree of creativity of the faculty members (p< 0.01). Also, there exist significant relationships between three indices of comprehensiveness, contemplation, flexibility and degree of creativity. Applying T test, no significant relationship is found between philosophic mindedness and degree of creativity of the faculty members in humanities and basic sciences. Moreover, there is no significant relationship between male and female professors regarding their creativity (p< 0.05), whereas regarding their level of philosophic mindedness, male exceeded female. Taking the indices of philosophic mindedness into account, contemplation shows a gender difference. That is, male professors present a more significant level of penetration than female (p> 0.01) while both were similar regarding other indices of comprehensiveness and flexibility.