Employee creativity is vital for organizational success, so sustaining it during a crisis—such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic—is essential. In a study with important implications for how organizations should react to crises to maintain employee creativity, HKUST researcher Yaping Gong and two colleagues show that an employee’s mindset and goal orientation determine whether a crisis enhances or stifles their creativity.

Periodic crises are an inevitable part of life, yet how they affect employee creativity has long been unclear. Some studies have found that the stress induced by a crisis stifles creativity, whereas others have found that it sparks creativity. To resolve these inconsistent findings, the authors take into account “that employees experience crisis events distinctively.” They “introduce the notion of employee-experienced crisis” to consider how a crisis affects individual employees within a team.

A fixed mindset, which is “the belief that personal attributes are given and unchangeable,” motivates employees to “prove their competency or avoid showing incompetency,” say the authors. They hypothesized that for these employees, the anxiety induced by a crisis inhibits creativity. However, a growth mindset, which is the belief that personal attributes are adaptable, motivates employees to increase their competence. The authors proposed that such employees “use a crisis as a prospect for self-development and discovery” and experience enhanced creativity as a result.

To test these suppositions, the authors surveyed R&D employees of technology firms in China. As expected, they found that employee-experienced crisis “reduced creativity via increased job anxiety for employees with a strong fixed mindset but increased creativity via creative process engagement for employees with a strong growth mindset.” A fixed mindset is closely associated with a goal orientation regarding how one’s performance is judged, while a growth mindset is associated with a goal orientation toward learning. Therefore, the authors next asked how goal orientation may further explain the role of mindset in regulating responses to experienced crisis (i.e., either creative process engagement or job anxiety) .

The authors surveyed R&D employees of technology firms in South Korea and found that a strong growth mindset promotes a learning goal orientation which in turn directs an employee to creative processes engagement as a response to experienced crisis, hence helping creativity. The authors similarly expected and found that a fixed mindset promotes a performance goal orientation which in turn engenders job anxiety as a response to experienced crisis, hence hindering creativity.

These novel findings have important practical implications for organizations. The authors suggest that in a crisis, managers should encourage employees “not to feel emotionally overwhelmed and coach them to formulate and execute coping strategies for learning and creative problem solving.” Managers can also be proactive by considering mindset and goal orientation in the hiring process and matching “individuals with a growth mindset and learning goal orientation to jobs that are more likely to experience crises.”