Incremental and radical creativity in dealing with a crisis at work

ABSTRACT 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.

Organizations and practitioners often take it for granted that it is a good thing to be a creative employee.While organizations try to create the conditions that make their workforce creative, researchers try to empirically uncover the strongest predictors of creativity.In that quest, however, we often forget to ask ourselves why exactly is it useful to be creative?And what is the added value of being a creative employee nowadays?Even though the large majority of scholars see creativity as an outcome variable that is important in its own right (e.g., Hammond, Neff, Farr, Schwall, & Zhao, 2011), creativity is less often seen as a predictor variable that may be related with other valuable employee outcomes.The present paper will address both possibilities.
First, our paper explores whether creativity benefits employees.Even though we know that creativity benefits employee performance and health (Zhang, Li, Song, & Gong, 2020), we still miss the "context" of this relationship and we do not fully understand the meaning and motivation of the displayed creativity.To examine this in a relevant and ecologically valid way, our paper focuses on a workplace crisis (i.e.,  as an extraordinary chance to address the conditions under which employees may not only want to but also have to act creatively.Even more importantly, our paper suggests that the displayed creativity in the face of COVID-19 is not "one-size-fits-all" but can be of different types.To substantiate this, we draw on coping flexibility theories (Kato, 2012) as well as exploitation versus exploration theorizing within creativity research (Gilson, Lim, D'Innocenzo, & Moye, 2012), suggesting that when people solve problems, they have two main options: either to exploit an existing solution (i.e., work with what "there is") or to flexibly consider a diverse set of solutions (i.e., work with what "could be").Essentially, this means that people change themselves either in incremental or in radical ways (Lohmann, 2019).Such a distinction brings to mind the concept of radical creativity (i.e., defined as major departures from organizational norms, practices, or products) versus incremental creativity (i.e., defined as minor departures from organizational norms, practices, or products; Madjar, Greenberg, & Chen, 2011).While the former focuses on reinventing a certain reality in a radical and extraordinary way, the latter simply focuses on improving, adjusting, or optimizing existing realities.
Interestingly, COVID-19 literature (e.g., Cohen & Cromwell, 2021) converges with the idea of this "dual" creativity, by showing that in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis at work, employees tried different things.In some occasions, they had to invent completely new strategies and rules and other times they simply had to work within existing constraints.Similarly, organizations during COVID-19 also had to follow either one of the two strategies or both strategies at the same time in order to survive, thus, displaying "ambidexterity" (Voss & Voss, 2013).For example, think of a fine-dining restaurant during lockdown that had to do major modifications in their services (i.e., going to the client rather than client going to them) combined with minor modifications in their menu (i.e., so that the food quality is preserved also after food delivery).Our paper proposes that both incremental and radical creativity (for different reasons) help employees not only to survive but also to thrive throughout work crises.Specifically, we address links between creativity (incremental as well as radical) and employee development as well as wellbeing.For the purposes of the present paper and considering what it means for an employee to grow or thrive throughout COVID-19, we operationalize employee development as an aggregate score of task performance, adaptive performance, and learning behaviors (cf.Pradhan & Jena, 2017) but we will also rerun analyses separately for each dimension.In addition, we operationalize wellbeing as low levels of employee exhaustion.Even though well-being can take more forms than simply (low) levels of exhaustion (Helzer & Kim, 2019), we have decided to follow previous practice that operationalizes well-being in times of crises in relation to employee exhaustion (Spagnoli, Buono, Kovalchuk, Cordasco, & Esposito, 2021).
Second, even though our aforementioned aim addresses the context within which creativity may help individuals, we still lack knowledge about the types of people who are more prone to respond creatively to crises (i.e., individual differences).To address this, we draw on self-regulation theories (e.g., Usher & Schunk, 2018) suggesting that individual self-regulation entails and is facilitated by (1) monitoring and (2) behavioral reactions.In other words, to regulate themselves, individuals need to be aware of their surroundings and to be proactive.Accordingly, we address mindfulness (Brown & Ryan, 2003) as well as employee personal initiative (Frese, Fay, Hilburger, Leng, & Tag, 1997) as two individual characteristics that may empower employees to respond to crises creatively.While personal initiative does so by making people solution-driven (Frese & Fay, 2001), mindfulness does so by making people aware of their surroundings and experiences, eliminating self-judgment, and weakening the effects of stressors (Bowlin & Baer, 2012).This is in agreement with extensive literature addressing personal characteristics as essential antecedents to creativity and innovation (Giluk, 2009;Kirton, 2011;Miron, Erez, & Naveh, 2004).
Our paper delivers three contributions to research and practice.First, we refine and bring together literature viewing creativity as a correlate of employee functioning (Zhang et al., 2020), especially throughout COVID-19 (Mercier et al., 2021;Tang, Hofreiter, Reiter-Palmon, Bai, & Murugavel, 2021).We, thus, use the COVID-19 context to address a salient crisis moment that gave reasons to people to be creative.Additionally, we propose that this creativity is not "one-size-fits-all" (Gilson et al., 2012), but can be either minor or major.Second, we aim to uncover individual conditions that make people creative.If the COVID-19 crisis represents the main contextual factor that makes employees creative, we still need to explore to which people this applies particularly.Finally, we aim to provide practitioners with a roadmap to creativity as a way to deal with crises.
Our theoretical framework has the potential to uncover individual factors (that have been found to be enhanced via interventions ;Hülsheger, Feinholdt, & Nübold, 2015;van Wingerden, Bakker, & Derks, 2017) that boost creativity.Similarly, practice may gain important knowledge as to what types of creativity (incremental and/or radical) are most beneficial for what types of employee outcomes (wellbeing and/or employee development) and, thereby, accordingly encourage a different type of creativity for different reasons.

Our hypothesized model
In the present paper, we view creativity as a behavior that, precisely because of the crisis, employees may proactively want to increase and, thereby, attain development (i.e., increased task performance, adaptation to changes and learning) as well as well-being (i.e., decreased emotional exhaustion).To address common method bias (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003) and because proactive behavior (Bakker, Tims, & Derks, 2012) and personal initiative (Tornau & Frese, 2013) is visible to others, personal initiative is rated by coworkers, while all other variables are self-rated.Our paper addresses mindfulness as a baseline (pre-COVID -19) variable, while it operationalizes all other variables (i.e., creativity, employee development, and exhaustion) both at pre-COVID-19 levels (i.e., retrospectively) and at post-COVID-19 levels.Personal initiative is reported by "others" only one time and without any specific time reference (i.e., as an "individual characteristic" of the respondent).Thus, even though, as explained above, we expect that both mindfulness and personal initiative can be enhanced by workplace interventions, our study is not an intervention study and we are interested in levels of mindfulness and personal initiative that respondents habitually display at their work.Therefore, we have decided to operationalize personal initiative and mindfulness as stable concepts, while we operationalize the rest of the variables as concepts that can change over time.A first set of hypotheses will address links between baseline mindfulness and personal initiative and post-COVID-19 changes in creativity, while a second set of hypotheses will address links between changes in creativity and changes in employee development and exhaustion (see Figure 1 for our hypothesized model).

Crises at the workplace
Our reasoning stems from the idea that crises can be transformed into something positive.Creativity research has often confirmed this idea.For example, the combination of negative emotions or dissatisfaction with positive emotions or a supportive environment has been found to lead to creativity (e.g., Zhou & George, 2001).The roots of these expectations lie in dual-tuning theories (George & Zhou, 2007;Gong, Wu, Song, & Zhang, 2017) and Bledow, Rosing, and Frese's (2013) affective shift creativity framework.What these theoretical frameworks have in common is their suggestion that creativity would be redundant in a perfect world without problems.Instead, it is an initial negative shock (i.e., COVID-19), subsequently combined with a positive and constructive mindset and attitude (i.e., mindfulness and personal initiative) that can jointly lead to creative solutions.

The role of mindfulness
According to self-regulation theories (e.g., Usher & Schunk, 2018), before taking any corrective action, people need to monitor themselves as well as their environment, which is an ability encapsulated by mindfulness.Mindfulness is a cognitive state of intentional, non-judgmental awareness, which involves focusing on the present and accepting experiences of each moment (Brown & Ryan, 2003;Kabat-Zinn, 2003).Even though one may argue that self-regulation entails judging oneself, literature suggests otherwise.In fact, being aware of one's environment and own behavior in a matter-of-fact rather than in a judgmental way is what drives successful self-regulation (Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007).
More specifically, the present paper operationalizes selfregulation as creativity displayed in the face of COVID-19.Therefore, it is worthwhile to examine how the literature has addressed the link between mindfulness and creativity.This link has been addressed both indirectly and directly.First, mindfulness gives access to several benefits that may lead to creativity.For example, mindfulness helps individuals concentrate (Sedlmeier et al., 2012), deal with their feelings and thoughts (Shapiro, Carlson, Astin, & Freedman, 2006), avoid judgments (Brown et al., 2007) and become more flexible cognitively (Carson & Langer, 2006).Second, ample evidence suggests that mindfulness is directly empirically related to creativity (e.g., see Lebuda, Zabelina, & Karwowski, 2016; for meta-analytic evidence), also displayed at the workplace (Cheung, Huang, Chang, & Wei, 2020).
More importantly for the scope of our paper, existing meta-analytic evidence on the link of mindfulness with creativity applies to a wide range of creativity operationalizations, both in the lab and outside the lab (Lebuda et al., 2016).For example, mindfulness (self-reported, measured in the lab or as intervention) has been found to enhance peoples' potential not only to attain unusual and unexpected solutions (cf.radical creativity; Ding, Tang, Deng, Tang, & Posner, 2015) but also to improve existing products or tasks (cf.incremental creativity; Ding et al., 2015;Montani, Setti, Sommovigo, Courcy, & Giorgi, 2020).All in all, we propose that mindful employees take a constructive, solution-oriented, and non-judgmental approach toward the COVID-19 crisis at work.This enables them, first, to improve situations, where possible, using the existing resources (i.e., incremental creativity) or to show the perseverance required to generate radically new solutions, when existing resources no longer work (i.e., radical creativity).

The role of personal initiative
Proactive employees who tend to take personal initiative are characterized by a tendency to "attack problems" and a desire to create positive change and solutions, rather than passively wait for things to get better (Frese et al., 1997, p. 161).Therefore, they are known to adopt strategies that optimize and improve their work characteristics (Bakker et al., 2012) and to generate creative solutions to problems (Binnewies, Ohly, & Sonnentag, 2007).This phenomenon has also been replicated throughout the COVID-19 times.For example, proactive health professionals seemed to be more energized and also to make better use of their strengths throughout the difficult COVID-19 times (Yi-Feng Chen et al., 2021).Even more importantly and along lines that are more relevant for our paper, proactive employees do not just display high levels of unidimensional creativity.In fact, they have been found to display both incremental and radical creativity (Waheed & Dastgeer, 2019).This is because individuals who want to tackle and solve problems are inventive and exhaust all the options that they have.As such, sometimes they will come up with major discoveries (cf.radical creativity) and other times, when breakthroughs are not possible or a viable option, they will flexibly switch to more conservative solutions, that even though creative, they still operate within the status quo (cf.incremental creativity).Hence, we formulate: Hypothesis 2: Personal initiative positively relates to increases in incremental creativity (2a) and radical creativity (2b).

Can creativity help deal with crises?
Incremental creativity is an extrinsic process, driven by a need to solve tangible problems and conform (Madjar et al., 2011) and is facilitated by a necessity rather than an internal drive (Gilson & Madjar, 2011).Radical creativity is more intrinsic; it is driven by the propensity to take risks (Madjar et al., 2011) and is more likely displayed for the mere joy of it or because of the feelings of competence it produces (Malik, Choi, & Butt, 2019).Even though one may be tempted to suggest that one type of creativity is better than the other, literature gives no reasons to substantiate such a proposition.Instead, it is more legitimate to see these types of creativity as responding to different challenges (or using different means to respond to a challenge).In other words, they represent two equally valuable strategies in organizational practice that offer different tools to employees to deal with crises at work.It is the stance of the present paper that although both incremental and radical creativity will help employees grow and develop in the face of a crisis, it is only incremental creativity that will help them prevent exhaustion.While both incremental and radical creativity represent ways to solve problems and perform well at work (Madjar et al., 2011), radical creativity requires sustained effort and may, thus, not be equally capable of preventing stress on the long run.To further substantiate this proposition, we draw on literature revealing a human bias against originality (Blair & Mumford, 2007).In parallel, we draw on the COR theory (Hobfoll, 2001), according to which, individual health and well-being is jeopardized by resource loss, whereas it is boosted by resource accumulation.While incremental creativity may only cost little to no resources, radical creativity is more likely to be costly in terms of resources (e.g., time, energy, disagreements with others etc.).Therefore, it is only incremental creativity that will benefit employee well-being (Zhang et al., 2020).

The role of incremental creativity
By improving or modifying products and processes without that being at the cost of efficiency, incremental creativity should have an obvious direct link with work performance (Shalley & Gilson, 2017).Consider the example of an advertisement bureau that has previously created an advertisement for a health self-scan app for older adults.In the future, because of new societal needs (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic), the employees of the bureau use the basic concept of their older advertisement but adjust it to refer to a COVID-19 health check.By being incrementally creative with their new advertisement, they most likely achieve two things: First, they fulfill, their mission and, thus, benefit their performance (i.e., they keep educating the public).Second, they learn how to adapt to more urgent societal needs, which can help them in future advertisements.
Incremental creativity should not only benefit learning, adjustment, and performance but also well-being.Consider the previous example: Using a previously successful advertisement during a stressful period (i.e., COVID-19 pandemic) may help employees of the advertisement bureau to prevent work overload and burnout.Minor task modifications are usually driven by employees' conformity (Madjar et al., 2011) and the tendency to "play safe."In other words, incremental creativity is most likely a way to secure a good outcome that works, rather than a ground-breaking outcome that may not work.Because they improve one's job without taking too much risk or costing resources, such ways to "optimise work processes" have been found to relate negatively to employee exhaustion (Costantini, Demerouti, Ceschi, & Sartori, 2021, p. 323).Zhang et al., (2020) empirical study indeed confirmed that incremental creativity plays a double role for employees, namely, it can help them to attain both job performance and wellbeing.
Although this role of incremental creativity in times of work crises or challenge has not been studied extensively, we expect it should be applicable even throughout or exactly because of the COVID-19 crisis at work.When dealing with unknown and threatening situations at work, making small work adjustments can be a way for employees to create the necessary conditions so that they do not simply survive but also flourish.Such minor task modifications may provide employees with the necessary tools that they miss or empower them and reduce their feelings of uncertainty, and as such, have been found to increase employee task and adaptive performance and to reduce employee exhaustion (Petrou, Demerouti, & Schaufeli, 2015, 2018).Recent preliminary evidence on how employees dealt with COVID-19 at work reveals several coping mechanisms and self-regulation strategies, such as increasing or optimizing the use of already existing organizational resources (Rigotti et al., 2021), adjusting technologies (Garfin, 2020), modifying tasks (Teng-Calleja, Caringal-Go, Manaois, Isidro, & Zantua, 2020), revisiting relationships with clients (Voorhees, Fombelle, & Bone, 2020) or adjusting one's way of thinking (Kruglanski, Molinario, & Lemay, 2021).All these acts of readjustments and modifications fit well with the core idea of incremental creativity.We, thus, formulate: Hypothesis 3: An increase in incremental creativity relates to an increase in employee development (i.e., task performance, adaptive performance, and learning; 3a) and a decrease in employee exhaustion (3b).

The role of radical creativity
Radical creativity can also benefit organizational efficiency, albeit via another route than incremental creativity.While incremental creativity often improves faulty processes, radical creativity completely reinvents them.This may sound extraordinary or rare but, in practice, it is often needed in organizations, when, for example, problems have no previously encountered solutions or when they are deep (e.g., rooted in organizational culture; Shalley & Gilson, 2017).Furthermore, if work performance means survival of the fittest, it is only radical ideas that will help someone excel and be on top of things.This is a well-known idea in innovation literature and practice, where outperforming competitors is of utmost importance (Norman & Verganti, 2014).Reversely, reinventing concepts and "pitching" radical ideas to others may be stressful for employees.Generally, people have a bias for unoriginal rather than original ideas since this is more comfortable for them (Blair & Mumford, 2007), which means that people often need to struggle or even be disagreeable when they need to convince others about the necessity of novel solutions (Hunter & Cushenbery, 2015).Because this may cost individual resources, it is unlikely to enhance one's wellbeing (e.g., see premises of the COR theory, Hobfoll, 2001).However, when the need for novelty is justified, then creativity does not have to be stressful anymore (Janssen, 2004).As such, although we do not expect that radical creativity will exacerbate employee exhaustion, we do not suggest that it will prevent it either.
Consider, again, our previous example of the same advertisement bureau that now needs to create a followup advertisement for a health self-scan app particularly targeted at teenagers.Teenagers were known to be slow in realizing the dangers of COVID-19 and are a population of different lifestyle than older adults.Therefore, it is unlikely that adjusting the previous advertisement for older adults (i.e., incremental creativity) would be efficient.Instead, the advertisement bureau decides to perform focus groups with teenagers in order to understand their needs and lifestyle.Eventually, they come up with an advertisement that is so relevant for teenagers that it makes them talk about it in social media and, therefore, it leaves them its mark.This radically creative approach may not have protected the wellbeing of the employees who made the ad (i.e., employees performed many focus groups and perhaps worked overtime) but it certainly was a way to attain high work performance, to adapt to a new target group and to learn from this situation.Zhang et al.'s (2020) study confirmed that radical creativity helps employees to better perform at their work but not to improve (neither harm) their wellbeing.
In addition to incremental strategies, the COVID-19 literature reveals numerous radical ways to deal with the new situation that emerged at work.Either due to the nature of a job or due to organizational culture, not all employees were equally capable of performing their jobs virtually after COVID-19 broke out.For these employees, it is more likely that radical rather than incremental adjustments were necessary in order to deal with COVID-19.For example, inventing ways in which technology can be used to do one's job in companies where this was previously unheard of was a common phenomenon throughout COVID-19 (Dwivedi et al., 2020).Additional coping mechanisms during COVID-19 that were radical in nature included searching for new market opportunities rather than using existing problemsolving opportunities (Visentin, Reis, Cappiello, & Casoli, 2021), revisiting one's work/family values or identity (Alcover et al., 2020;Teng-Calleja et al., 2020) or reinventing the core values of one's institution (Gigliotti, 2021).We, thus, formulate: Hypothesis 4: An increase in radical creativity relates to an increase in employee development (i.e., task performance, adaptive performance, and learning).
Data collection was performed by Flycatcher, a professional research bureau conducting online panel surveys.The data are part of a wider 2-wave research project about self-regulation during COVID-19 that started two months after the COVID-19 crisis broke out in The Netherlands.At Time 1 of the study (May 2020), respondents answered questions about: (a) retrospective accounts of their behaviors throughout the three months before COVID-19 broke out (henceforth referred to as T0 variables) and (b) their behaviors throughout the two first months after COVID-19 broke out (henceforth referred to as T1 variables).Additionally, at Time 1, the coworkers (i.e., otherraters) reported the personal initiative of the main respondent without any specific time frame (i.e., as a general individual characteristic of the main respondent).At Time 2 of the study (September 2020), the main respondents answered questions about their behaviors throughout the three months after the Time 1 survey (henceforth referred to as T2 variables).As part of being a panel member of Flycatcher, participants received 300 points for the T1 survey and 200 points for the T2 survey (900 points can be exchanged by panel members for a gift voucher of 10 Euro's or a similar donation).In addition, if they filled in both surveys and they also recruited a coworker who provided otherratings for the main participant, then both the main participant and the coworker, each, received a gift voucher of 20 Euro's.In total, 2893 main participants and 331 coworkers were invited to fill in their respective survey.After filtering out participants on the basis of exclusion criteria (e.g., no paid work or no contact with coworkers at work), the response rate for the participants was 26% (T1) and 22% (T2) and 81% for the coworkers.

Instruments
The present paper uses T0 (retrospective), T1 and T2 self-reported accounts for creativity, development, and well-being; T0 (retrospective) self-reported accounts for mindfulness and no time frame for other-rated personal initiative (i.e., reported by others at T1 as a general individual characteristic of the main respondent; for a more detailed description of our time measurements, please, see the "sample and procedure" section above).For all items, the answering scale ranged from 1 = totally agree to 7 = totally disagree because this is what the panel members were used to due to their previous work with Flycatcher; all items (except mindfulness; see below) were reverse recoded before data analyses.Alpha's for all variables are reported in Table 1.
Mindfulness was measured with five items from the Mindful Attention and Awareness Scale (Brown & Ryan, 2003).Items (e.g., "I find it difficult to stay focused on what's happening in the present" and "I find myself doing things without paying attention") were all reverse.
Personal initiative was measured with the 7-item scale by Frese et al. (1997).Example items were " . . . is particularly good at realizing ideas" and " . . .actively attacks problems." Creativity was measured with Madjar et al.'s (2011) 3-item incremental creativity scale (e.g., "I use previously existing ideas or work in an appropriate new way") and 3-item radical creativity scale (e.g., "I suggest radically new ways for doing my work").

A latent change score approach
The present paper assumes that employees may increase their creativity because of COVID-19, which may relate to change in employee development and exhaustion.To capture change appropriately, we analyzed our data with a latent change score (LCS) approach in Mplus.This approach captures the difference in mean scores between two different time measurements using a latent factor rather than using raw difference scores.This gives an estimate of the change between the two measurements that is corrected for measurement error (for a review of this technique, see McArdle, 2009).For the purposes of the present paper, a positive link between two change scores means that an increase (decrease) in one variable is associated with an increase (decrease) in the other variable.Reversely, a negative link between two change scores means that an increase (decrease) in one variable is associated with a decrease (increase) in the other variable.To simplify our models, we used mean scores (rather than items) to represent incremental creativity, radical creativity and exhaustion.Latent employee development was represented by factor scores comprised by task performance, adaptive performance and learning.Latent mindfulness and personal initiative were represented by their respective items.

Building our models
To test Hypotheses 1 and 2 (i.e., links between mindfulness and personal initiative with creativity), we built a model including the effects of mindfulness and personal initiative on T0-T1 change in incremental and radical creativity and on T1-T2 change in incremental and radical creativity, after correcting for the respective effects of T0-T1 change on T1-T2 change.
To test Hypotheses 3 and 4, we tested four different models.These were as follows: Model 2a included: (a) the effect of T0-T1 change in incremental creativity on T1-T2 change in personal development, corrected for the T0-T1 change in employee development and (b) the effect of T0-T1 change in employee development on T1-T2 change in incremental creativity, corrected for T0-T1 change in incremental creativity.Within both time points (both in T0-T1 and in T1-T2) all latent variables correlate with each other (i.e., incremental creativity, radical creativity, employee development, and exhaustion).
Model 2b included: (a) the effect of T0-T1 change in incremental creativity on T1-T2 change in exhaustion, corrected for the T0-T1 change in exhaustion and (b) the effect of T0-T1 change in exhaustion on T1-T2 change in incremental creativity, corrected for T0-T1 change in incremental creativity.At both time points (T0-T1 and T1-T2), latent variables correlate with each other (incremental creativity, radical creativity, employee development, and exhaustion).
Model 2c included: (a) the effect of T0-T1 change in radical creativity on T1-T2 change in personal development, corrected for the T0-T1 change in employee development and (b) the effect of T0-T1 change in employee development on T1-T2 change in radical creativity, corrected for T0-T1 change in radical creativity.Within both time points (both in T0-T1 and in T1-T2) all latent variables correlate with each other (i.e., incremental creativity, radical creativity, employee development, and exhaustion).
Model 2d included: (a) the effect of T0-T1 change in radical creativity on T1-T2 change in exhaustion, corrected for the T0-T1 change in exhaustion and (b) the effect of T0-T1 change in exhaustion on T1-T2 change in radical creativity, corrected for T0-T1 change in radical creativity.At both time points (T0-T1 and T1-T2) all latent variables correlate with each other (i.e., incremental creativity, radical creativity, employee development and exhaustion).

Preliminary analyses
Table 1 provides descriptive statistics and intercorrelations for all the observed variables (mean scores) across times.Cronbach's alpha coefficients were more than acceptable for all measures (see diagonal of the table ).

Mean levels of latent change
As can be seen in Table 2, there was a slight decrease in radical creativity from T0 to T1 and an increase from T1 to T2.Similarly, there was a (stronger) decrease of employee development from T0 to T1 and a decrease from T1 to T2.Finally, exhaustion increased from T0 to T1 and remained stable from T1 to T2.Incremental creativity did not show changes over time.

Occupational sectors
To avoid further complicating our analyses, we dummy coded only the two occupational sectors with the highest frequencies, namely, the health sector (22%) and the education sector (9%).Preliminary analyses revealed that the health sector was unrelated to the T0-T1 change in incremental creativity, b = .009,se = .038,p = .805,the T0-T1 change in radical creativity, b = .031,se = .038,p = .421,the T1-T2 change in incremental creativity, b = −.026,se = .040,p = .521,and the T1-T2 change in radical creativity, b = .027,se = .040,p = .497.Similarly, the education sector was unrelated to the T0-T1 change in incremental creativity, b = .042,se = .038,p = .130,the T0-T1 change in radical creativity, b = .058,se = .038,p = .130,the T1-T2 change in incremental creativity, b = −.004,se = .040,p = .922,and the T1-T2 change in radical creativity, b = −.072,se = .040,p = .070.Furthermore, there are no reasons to believe that certain occupational sectors had to display more creativity than other ones, since the COVID-19 crisis is known to have brought considerable changes to all jobs.For this reason and because there is no theory to justify this choice (Bernerth & Aguinis, 2016), we have decided not to control for occupational sectors.

Overview of results
The following sections present all our hypothesized and additional analyses.An overview of these results can be found in Table 3.

Exploratory analyses: the interaction between mindfulness and personal initiative
In the light of the non-significant main effects of mindfulness and personal initiative on both types of creativity, we decided to conduct additional exploratory analyses of the joint (interactive) effects of the two predictors on both creativity outcomes.The interaction between mindfulness and personal initiative was significantly related to T0-T1 change in incremental creativity; b = .143,se = .057,p = .013,β = .236.Simple slope tests (see Figure 2) revealed that the effect of mindfulness on T0-T1 change in incremental creativity was negative when personal initiative was 1 SD below the mean (estimate = −.151,s.e.= .064,p = .018)and positive when personal initiative was 1 SD above the mean (estimate = .135,s.e.= .064,p = .035).The interaction effect was unrelated to T0-T1 change in radical creativity; b = .090,se = .052,p = .079,β = .139.When correcting for the T0-T1 change in incremental and radical creativity, the interaction effect was, again, unrelated to T1-T2 change in incremental creativity; b = −.030,se = .049,p = .537,β = −.032 or to T1-T2 change in radical creativity; b = −.041,se = .053,p = .435,β = −.042.

Incremental creativity and employee development
Hypothesis 3a predicted a link between increases in incremental creativity and increases in employee development.The T0-T1 change in incremental creativity positively correlated with T0-T1 change in employee development; r = .471,p < .001and negatively with T1-T2 change in employee development; r = −.381,p < .001.Given the negative correlations between T0-T1 and T1-T2 change scores that we have consistently found throughout our study, this second negative correlation could represent a ceiling-effect (see discussion section for further elaboration).
After    While incremental creativity, radical creativity and exhaustion are based on means scores of their respective items, employee development uses a factor score comprised by task performance, adaptive performance and learning; Due to rounding, difference scores may not precisely represent the respective difference at decimal level; *p < .05,** p < .01creativity was positively correlated with T1-T2 change in employee development; r = .303,p < .001,implying that an increase in incremental is accompanied by an increase in employee development both between T0 and T1 and between T1 and T2.These findings provide support to Hypothesis 3a.

Incremental creativity and exhaustion
Hypothesis 3b predicted a link between increases in incremental creativity and decreases in employee exhaustion.T0-T1 change in incremental creativity negatively correlated with T0-T1 change in exhaustion; r = −.093,p = .019,and positively with T1-T2 exhaustion; r = .080,p = .043.This second positive correlation could be due to a bottom-effect (see discussion).

Radical creativity and employee development
Hypothesis 4 predicted a link between increases in radical creativity and increases in employee development.T0-T1 change in radical creativity positively correlated with T0-T1 change in employee development; r = .408,p < .001and negatively with T1-T2 change in employee development; r = −.299,p < .001.This second negative correlation could be due to a ceiling-effect (see discussion).

Additional analyses per dimension of personal development
We rerun analyses replacing employee development with task performance, adaptive performance and learning, separately.Results did not alter our aforementioned main findings.The only exception was that the path from T0-T1 change in incremental creativity to T1-T2 change in learning, from non-significant, became negative (b = −.124,se = .048,p < .05,β = −.089).

Discussion
Our paper aimed at addressing the correlates of incremental and radical creativity during the COVID-19 crisis at work.Looking at our sample overall, there were no average changes in incremental creativity and there was an initial decrease in radical creativity (T1) which later increased (T2).This may suggest that our respondents did not, on average, display incremental creativity amid COVID-19; instead, radical creativity seemed to be more prevalent.However, while our respondents may have been in a "freeze" or even traumatic phase two months after COVID-19 broke out (Ikizer, Karanci, Gul, & Dilekler, 2021) and still unable to think of radical ideas (i.e., decreased radical creativity in T1), these radical ideas seemed to appear five months after the crisis (i.e., increased radical creativity at T2).It could also be that because COVID-19 infection rates were much higher at T2 (September 2020) than at T1 (May 2020), which refers to the "second wave" right after the summer (Dutch Government, 2022), the reasons to be radically creative were more salient at T2 than at T1. Another notable pattern was that an increase in creativity at any of the two data points (T1 or T2) related to a decrease in creativity at the other data point.This echoes the "ceiling-effect" that is often encountered in organizational research (e.g., Alessandri, Consiglio, Luthans, & Borgogni, 2018).Our study was not an intervention and it did not focus on behaviors that develop naturally (cf.developmental psychology).Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that creativity cannot increase endlessly.However, our aim was not to describe general patterns in our "average" respondent.Our aim was to explore the correlates of the changes in creativity, only for those people who, for any reason at all, did change their creativity.
We hypothesized that mindful and proactive employees will display an increase in both incremental and radical creativity.Results did not confirm any of these hypotheses, although, additional analyses revealed that mindfulness relates to increased incremental creativity when personal initiative was also high.Furthermore, we expected and we also found that while increases in incremental creativity relate to increases in employee development and decreases in exhaustion, increases in radical creativity only relate to increases in employee development.

The role of individual characteristics
Mindfulness was unrelated to both types of creativity.Even though we can only speculate about this lack of findings, a plausible interpretation could be found in existing empirical studies.For example, the metaanalysis of Lebuda et al., (2016) revealed that the link of mindfulness with creativity was weaker for the awareness component of mindfulness (which is the conceptualization that the present paper adopts) than for the open monitoring component.Lebuda et al., (2016) conclude that future research is yet to show the different roles of the two components of mindfulness for the different stages in the creative process.Because the COVID-19 context calls for action, it could be that a more proactive element of mindfulness is more suitable to start the creative process and it could be argued that simple awareness is less proactive than open monitoring.
In a similar vein, personal initiative failed to lead to increased creativity and it was even related to less incremental creativity at T2.Perhaps, even though proactive employees tend to solve problems creatively, doing so in moments of crises is less straightforward and potentially more complex and demanding.For example, coming up with creative solutions to COVID-19 is not simply a matter of personal skills, motivation, or mindset.On top of that, people need to feel empowered to do so and to be enabled by their organizations and by their leaders (Siswanti & Muafi, 2020), which are all factors that we have not measured.Another interpretation could be that proactive individuals already sought other type of (e.g., structural/organizational) help at T1 and therefore there was less need for creativity at T2.Taken together, our findings seem to suggest that both personal initiative and mindfulness were, in themselves, not adequate so as to initiative creativity amid COVID-19.
Notably, though, and unexpectedly, mindfulness was related to increased incremental creativity at T1 when personal initiative was also high.There is not enough evidence to have driven such a hypothesis, but the existing empirical evidence seems to imply that mindfulness and proactivity may complement each other and have additive or joint positive effects.This could be because mindfulness may lead to reflection without action and proactivity may lead to action without reflection; thus, the combination of both can harness the best of both worlds.In a somewhat similar vein, employee proactive behaviors have been found to relate to creativity either via self-reflection (Li, Chen, Chen, Bai, & Crant, 2020) or when individuals value learning rather than performance (Bakker, Petrou, Op den Kamp, & Tims, 2020).Even though such findings do not directly address mindfulness, they suggest that proactivity may represent a "hard" or action-oriented self-regulation tactic that also needs other "softer" (and more reflective) selfregulation tactics in order to lead to creativity.This could be particularly true within the uncertain or hostile context of a crisis, whereby a solution orientation will not necessarily lead to good solutions and, thus, needs to be completed by attitudes or behaviors that protect employees from fear of failure.Whether this holds only for incremental creativity (as we have found in our sample) or also for radical creativity remains to be further addressed by future research.In any case, this interactive effect was an unexpected finding and needs to be interpreted cautiously.

Links with employee development and health
Most importantly, our paper has uncovered that while incremental creativity relates to both employee health and development, radical creativity primarily relates to development.Interestingly, an unexpected negative effect of radical creativity on exhaustion occurred at T1 but not at T2.One could, again, speculate that this may have to do with the higher infection rates of T2.If T2 was a more uncertain or threatening context for our respondents, it could be that our hypothesizing about the stressful implications of radical creativity was more applicable at T2 than at T1. Perhaps, radical creativity has some limited potential to benefit one's well-being (e.g., if the generated solutions eliminate stressors or obstacles).But the more threating the context is, the more costly this radical creativity becomes and the less possible it is to benefit well-being.
Overall, our findings support previous evidence (Zhang et al., 2020) and replicate it within the context of the COVID-19 crisis at work.In addition to exploring why creativity is useful (i.e., via correlates with other important employee outcomes), we have done so at a moment when creativity has very tangible reasons to be useful (i.e., .Therefore, we have contributed to the ecological validity of these findings by suggesting that the added value of creativity is salient during, or precisely because of, a crisis at work.Taken together, our findings provide further validation to dualtuning theories (George & Zhou, 2007;Gong et al., 2017) as well as frameworks of creativity dynamics (Bledow et al., 2013).Accordingly, creativity is not born out of satisfaction or self-sufficient states; rather it may be relevant or increase particularly in times of crises.Our results suggest not only that creativity may be prevalent throughout times of crises but also that these displayed creative responses help employees deal with these crises successfully.We believe that our study has contributed to and further refined the relatively novel research line of incremental and radical creativity (e.g., Gilson & Madjar, 2011;Madjar et al., 2011;Zhang et al., 2020) and, most importantly, has done so by validating its findings within an actual crisis context (COVID-19).

Limitations and implications for future research
The most important drawback of the present study is that all pre-COVID-19 measures were retrospective and, thus, could have led to recall biases.Unavoidably, baseline (pre-crises) measures are difficult to obtain, certainly to the extent that the crisis is unexpected.However, most of our findings involving retrospective (T0) measures were replicated with the change scores from T1 to T2, which did not involve retrospective measures.Future research could use planned "negative" change as a research context (e.g., implementation of an initiative that is faced with resistance from employees).In that case, it will be possible to have clear-cut baseline measures and, again, the hypothesis can be tested that incremental and radical creativity helps employees deal with the unfavorable initiative.In addition, our design cannot be used to make causal inferences because it is based on correlations between change scores.Even though it is a legitimate hypothesis that the increased creativity (compared to pre-COVID-19 levels) is displayed in order to deal with COVID-19 and, thus, relates to better employee adjustment, the reverse causation is also plausible.Namely, because employees performed well or experienced heightened well-being throughout COVID-19, they had more capacity to display creativity.Similarly, learning could be conceived as a byproduct and not necessarily a consequence of creativity.Future research could test all these possibilities and perhaps also tailor the items of creativity to refer to a certain crisis (i.e., refer to creative solutions to the crisis) rather than using generic creativity items, as our study has done.Our paper also makes use of self-reported creativity which is subject to common-method bias, thus, future research could employ other-ratings of creativity.
We note here that even though latent change score analysis is a strong analytic method gaining popularity in organizational research (Matusik, Hollenbeck, & Mitchell, 2021), it needs to be interpreted carefully.A positive relation between two change scores just means that the two changes move in the same direction, that is, increases in one are associated with increases in the other and decreases in one are associated with decreases in the other.A negative relation on the other hand means the two changes move in the opposite direction with an increase in one going together with a decrease in the other or a decrease in one going together with an increase in the other.
Furthermore, the COVID-19 crisis represents the main contextual variable in our research model and was "constant" for all participants.However, previously, we have argued that additional contextual variables (e.g., feeling empowered or leadership styles adopted within an organization) may also play a role within our model, which is possibility worth exploring in the future.
Next, even though other-rated personal initiative helped deal with common-method bias, it has been suggested that other-rated personal initiative may represent different conceptual dimensions compared to selfrated personal initiative (Den Hartog & Belschak, 2007).Therefore, future research could replicate our findings using self-rated personal initiative.
Last but not least, we currently know that creativity is not just about producing ideas.It is a more complex process that starts with understanding the problem (Abdulla, Paek, Cramond, & Runco, 2020) and goes up until the implementation of the generated ideas (Gilson & Litchfield, 2017;Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017).Those are processes that we have not addressed and future research may want to test whether our findings hold also for other phases of the creative process.

Implications for practice and conclusion
Looking at the interaction effect of mindfulness and personal initiative within our data, we could tentatively suggest to organizations who want to have creative employees to use employee coaching or interventions in order to empower employees to be proactive but also to display a "mindful" rather than superficial proactivity.
However, this recommendation should be treated with caution.In fact, future organizational interventions should best compare three different interventions, one that focuses on mindfulness, one that focuses on personal initiative and one that focuses on both.It is our expectation that the third intervention will have the highest chances of eliciting (incremental) employee creativity.
Most importantly, our study suggests that when organizations need to "play it safe" and to enhance a type of employee creativity that is beneficial both for employee health and development, it would be best to encourage incremental creativity.Encouraging incremental creativity could be achieved by emphasizing the extrinsic rewards associated with the creative outcome (Gilson & Madjar, 2011) and by expecting employees to be creative within the rules rather than breaking the rules (Madjar et al., 2011).In addition, there could be times (e.g., T2 of our study, namely five months after COVID-19 started) when the need for radical creativity might be stronger.To encourage radical creativity, organizations should best emphasize the intrinsic rewards associated with creativity and empower employees to brainstorm freely without constrains (Malik et al., 2019).However, our study suggests that radical creativity neither harms nor benefits employee health.Therefore, when organizations emphasize the need for radical creativity, they should make sure that they do so in a way that protects employee health.This could include the provision of adequate organizational resources, opportunities for recovery and clear boundaries between work time and non-work time.
All in all, our study suggests that creativity may be seen as an employee self-regulation method of dealing with crises at work.Creative solutions to COVID-19 were possibly not "one-size-fits-all"; instead, they could have been either incremental or radical in nature.While incremental creativity may have links to both employee health and performance, radical creativity only seems to benefit employee development.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
The reported study has been funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Grant number: 440.20.027;nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. The relationship between mindfulness and T0-T1 change in incremental creativity moderated by personal initiative.

Table 3 .
Summary of tested effects.

Table 2 .
Means of observed variables and latent change scores over time (N = 642 employees).