The dissertation is composed of two associated essays on team crisis and creativity. In the first essay, I focus on the relationship between employee experienced crisis in a team and employee creativity. In an increasingly uncertain environment, employees experience crises from time to time when working in a team. Threat-rigidity thesis suggests that their experienced crisis will stifle creativity, whereas sense-making perspective suggests that the crisis can potentially stimulate it. In this study, I reconcile the two perspectives by theorizing and examining when employee experienced crisis in a team (hereafter, employee experienced crisis) hinders or helps creativity. I found employee experienced crisis had a negative relationship with employee creativity via decreased creativ...[ Read more ]

The dissertation is composed of two associated essays on team crisis and creativity. In the first essay, I focus on the relationship between employee experienced crisis in a team and employee creativity. In an increasingly uncertain environment, employees experience crises from time to time when working in a team. Threat-rigidity thesis suggests that their experienced crisis will stifle creativity, whereas sense-making perspective suggests that the crisis can potentially stimulate it. In this study, I reconcile the two perspectives by theorizing and examining when employee experienced crisis in a team (hereafter, employee experienced crisis) hinders or helps creativity. I found employee experienced crisis had a negative relationship with employee creativity via decreased creative process engagement when entity belief was high. On the other hand, employee experienced crisis had a positive relationship with their creativity via increased creative process engagement when incremental belief was high. I advance threat-rigidity thesis by showing when the negative impact of crisis on employee creativity (and the associated negative mechanism) is likely to hold. I also expand sense-making perspective by showing when the positive impact of crisis on creativity (and the associated positive mechanism) is likely to hold. I offer a practical implication regarding what managers can do to steer clear of the detrimental but tap into the beneficial side of crisis.

In the second essay, I focus on the relationship between team crisis and team creativity. In an uncertain business world, team structure acts as a basic organizing strategy for performing creativity. Team is a focal context where an employee experiences critical events from time to time. There are the conflicting views on team crisis and creativity in literature. Threat-rigidity thesis suggests that team crisis will hinder team creativity, whereas sense-making perspective suggests that crisis can potentially stimulate it. In this study, as I did in the first essay, I reconcile the two perspectives by theorizing and examining when team crisis hinders or stimulates team creativity. For this study, I introduce collective implicit belief as a boundary condition under which team crisis stifles or stimulates team creativity. I found team crisis had a negative relationship with team creativity via reduced team creative process engagement when collective entity belief was high. However, there is not a shred of evidence that team crisis had a positive relationship with team creativity via greater team creative process engagement when collective incremental belief was high. Based on the findings, I advance threat-rigidity thesis by showing when the negative impact of crisis on creativity (and the associated negative mechanism) is likely to hold. I provide a practical implication regarding what managers can do to avoid the negative side of team crisis.