77 Proactive Vitality Management, Work Engagement, and Creativity INTRODUCTION It is generally assumed that organizations need to be creative in order to stay ahead of a changing marketplace and competitors. This is easier said than done. Creative employees need to pose questions that challenge common wisdom. They also need to observe well and scrutinize the behaviors of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things. Moreover, creative ideas originate when people are flexible in their thinking and persistent (Nijstad, De Dreu, Rietzschel, & Baas, 2010) – two strategies that demand considerable energetic, affective, and cognitive resources. In the present study, we argue that employees are not creative all the time and may need to proactively manage their own resources to reach creativity. More specifically, we use the proactivity literature (Frese & Fay, 2001; Parker, Williams, & Turner, 2006) to argue that employees who proactively build energy, inspiration, and motivation (i.e., “proactive vitality management”; masked, in press) will be more engaged and creative at their work. For example, individuals may actively work on their own motivation during or after working hours by networking to meet people with different ideas and perspectives. Similarly, individuals may take a walk in the park during the workday with the intention to change one’s psychological state, or may visit an art gallery with the goal to find new inspiration. We also investigate the boundaries of this proactive behavior by examining the impact of learning versus performance goal orientation. With this research, we aim to make the following contributions. First, whereas most scholars have focused on more distal environmental and personality factors as predictors of (work-related) creativity, we focus on a more proximal predictor of creativity – proactive vitality management. Second, although previous research has shown that energy, positive affect, and focus relate positively to creativity, most scholars have overlooked the possibility that employees may proactively manage such energetic, affective, and cognitive resources to be creative. This bottom-up approach originates from the proactivity literature and could be an important addition to more common top-down approaches to creativity. Third, we use a five-week followup study design to test whether proactive behavior aimed at vitality management is positively related to creativity, through work engagement. We complement previous cross-sectional and longitudinal survey studies on proactivity, work engagement, and 4
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw