TY - GEN A1 - Geenen, Noreen Y. R. A1 - Mühlfeld, Katrin A1 - Urbig, Diemo T1 - Foundations of innovativeness in the international arena: Foreign language use and creative performance T2 - European Journal of International Management N2 - Individuals' creativity is a key resource underlying an organisation's innovativeness. With workplaces becoming increasingly multilingual, a question of growing relevance concerns whether using a native versus a foreign language affects individuals' creativity. This study integrates research on foreign language in international business and on determinants of individual creativity with cognitive psychological research. Experiments suggest a detrimental effect of foreign versus native language use on creative performance, which is stronger in verbal tasks. Subjectively perceived foreign language proficiency appears to mitigate this negative effect. In tasks framed in figural terms, foreign language use even seems to stimulate creativity compared with a native language setting. This finding implies a potential lever for organisations seeking to stimulate employees' creativity to deliberately use a foreign language context to encourage thinking outside the box, particularly when using nonverbal creativity tools. Important implications arise for future research and practice in international management and creativity and innovation management. KW - foreign language use KW - foreign language proficiency KW - foreign language anxiety KW - creativity KW - creative performance KW - divergent thinking KW - innovativeness Y1 - 2022 UR - http://urbig.org/mediapool/90/907078/data/publications/Geenen_Muehlfeld_Urbig_-_EJIM_-_Foreign_language_and_creativity.pdf U6 - https://doi.org/10.1504/EJIM.2022.10045539 SN - 1751-6765 ER -