Task motivation makes the difference between what an engineer can do and what he will do. The former depends on his levels of expertise and creative thinking skills. But it is his task motivation that determines the extent to which he will fully engage his expertise and creative thinking skills in the service of creative performance. To some extent, a high degree of intrinsic motivation can even make up for a deficiency of expertise or creative thinking skills. A highly intrinsically motivated person is likely to draw skills from other domains, or apply great effort to acquiring necessary skills in the target domain,^^
Although a person’s development of expertise and practice of creative thinking skills can be influenced to some extent by the social environment, the strongest and most direct influence of the environment is probably on motiva- tion. Certainly, a person starts out with a level of intrinsic motivation that depends on his or her basic enjoyment of the work. But experiments like those described earlier have shown how a person’s basic motivational orientation for a task, and resulting creativity on that task, can be influenced by even momentary alterations in the work environment. For example, an engineer may be highly intrinsically motivated to undertake a new project of his own design, but he may be singularly uninterested in a project handed to him by the direaor of the lab.