The Effect of Mental Health on Strategic Preparation for Crisis Regarding the Mediating Role of Organizational Learning Ability and Creativity of Firefighters of Guilan province

Crises are inevitable and organizations must be strategically prepared to deal with them. In this regard, the learning ability and creativity of the organization's employees are positive factors in controlling the crisis. Of course, organizations can be effective in crises when their human resources also feel psychologically better. So, this study aimed to investigate the effect of mental health on strategic preparation for crisis regarding the mediating role of organizational learning ability and creativity of firefighters in Guilan province.

The present study is an applied and descriptive study that was conducted as a survey in terms of data collection. The statistical population of the study consisted of 1111 employees of fire stations in Guilan. Due to the dispersion of the population, first through the cluster sampling method, a number of these organizations were identified in clusters of the province. Then, according to Cochran's formula, 286 of them were considered as the sample through a simple random sampling method. The present study was used these questionnaires; the general health of Goldberg (1979), the strategic preparation for crisis of Reilly (1987), the organizational learning ability of Jerez-Gomez et al. (2005), and the organizational creativity of Rhee & Choi (2017). Cronbach's alpha of each questionnaire was 0.88, 0.84, 0.94, and 0.78, respectively. To analyze the data, the structural equation modeling method of Smart PLS software was used.

The results showed that mental health has a positive and significant effect on the organizational learning ability and creativity of firefighters. It was also found that organizational learning ability has a positive and significant effect on organizational creativity and firefighters’ strategic preparation for crisis. However, the effect of mental health and organizational creativity on firefighters’ strategic preparation for crisis in Guilan was rejected. The positive and significant mediating role of organizational learning ability was accepted in the relationship between mental health and strategic preparation for crisis and in the relationship between mental health and organizational creativity. But the mediating role of organizational creativity was rejected in the research model.

The crises faced by a firefighter are emergencies that one may not be able to respond to at the moment, but learning makes one more prepared and has a positive effect on one's creativity. Also, the desired level of employees’ mental health can positively affect their learning ability.