126 Chapter 5 GENERAL DISCUSSION In the present research, we aimed to integrate the proactivity, mindfulness, and creativity literatures to describe a process in which individuals may proactively promote their own creativity on a daily basis by purposefully managing their vitality for work and thereby altering their state of mind. Replicated findings from two daily diary studies among working individuals largely supported our hypotheses, emphasizing the added value of a proactive approach in the creative process. In what follows, we will discuss the theoretical contributions of our research. Theoretical Contributions The creativity literature is quite extensive, and scholars have provided many insights into factors that may either benefit or harm creative performance. Traditionally, creativity studies have employed top-down perspectives and a focus on distal predictors of creativity that are relatively far away from the creative process, such as personality and job characteristics (e.g., Anderson et al., 2014; Shalley & Gilson, 2004). However, such factors are less likely to explain daily, intra-individual variations in creative performance. Moreover, researchers have theorized and shown the importance of individuals’ self-regulatory and proactive behaviors in the creative process (Bakker et al., 2020; De Stobbeleir et al., 2011; Op den Kamp et al., 2018, 2020). This perspective contributes to and integrates proactivity and creativity literatures and alludes to a potential interplay in the creative process betweenmore distal contextual factors on the one hand and daily proactive behaviors on the other hand. For example, the effective management of physical and mental energy on a day-to-day basis may, on those days, enable individuals to enact and make optimal use of potentially fruitful contextual conditions for creativity that are available to them, such as supportive colleagues and useful resources (cf. Daniels, 2006). Our research provides additional support for proactive motivation theory, which states that individuals may initiate goal-directed behavior to change aspects of the self or the environment (i.e., locus of change) in order to achieve a different future (Parker et al., 2010). Accordingly, we have investigated a proactive process where individuals change aspects of the self (i.e., their physical and mental energy) to achieve a different future (i.e., optimal functioning in terms of creative performance). Our findings address
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