Although a crisis provides room for creativity, organizations often suffer from creativity deficits even in a crisis. This study introduces employee-experienced crisis, defined as the impact an employee experiences from crisis event(s) in a team, examining the interaction between different mindsets with employee’s creativity. The research found that when an individual possesses a strong fixed mindset, an employee-experienced crisis tends to stifle employee creativity. In contrast, the same phenomenon stimulates creativity via enhanced creative process engagement when the individual has a strong growth mindset.
Amid the pandemic and all the challenges society is currently facing, strengthening the growth mindset of employees and leveraging the intellectual capital of employees’ creativity are undoubtedly effective strategies to overcome any crisis.