Incremental and radical creativity in dealing with a crisis at work

The present study addresses creativity as an employee strategy adopted to deal with challenges and distinguishes between incremental creativity (i.e., minor modifications to existing practices) and radical creativity (i.e., major departures from current practices). We hypothesize that employee self-reported mindfulness and other-rated personal initiative relate to increases in incremental and radical creativity throughout the COVID-19 crisis. We also expect that while increases in incremental creativity relate to increases in employee development and wellbeing, increases in radical creativity only relate to increases in employee development. To test our expectations, we conducted a 2-wave survey study among 642 professionals (and their 245 coworkers) from different occupations in May 2020 (Time 1) and in September 2020 (Time 2), asking respondents to provide retrospective baseline behavior before COVID-19 (Time 0). Latent change score analyses revealed that respondents who increased their incremental creativity after COVID-19, also reported higher development and wellbeing. Respondents who increased their radical creativity, reported higher development. Mindfulness was unrelated to both types of creativity and, unexpectedly, personal initiative related to a T1-T2 decrease in incremental creativity. Additional analyses revealed that mindfulness positively related to T0-T1 change in incremental creativity when personal initiative was high, while this link was negative when personal initiative was low.