79 Proactive Vitality Management, Work Engagement, and Creativity argued that individuals must “enact” job characteristics such as autonomy in order for stable job characteristics to have an impact on organizational outcomes. By using the freedom to work with self-chosen methods on a certain day, people feel a sense of volition, and this may be the reason why autonomy ameliorates strain, frees the mind, and fosters creativity on that day. The same is true for personality factors. Openness to new experiences is a relatively distal predictor of creativity (Ma, 2009), but it may explain how some individuals learn from challenging tasks whereas others who are less open to new experiences become stressed. Similarly, proactive personality (Kim, Hon, & Lee, 2010) and creative self-efficacy (Tierney & Farmer, 2002) are positively related to creativity, but if individuals do not express these personality characteristics in certain situations or during certain timeframes, they are not likely to be creative in those situations and timeframes. Indeed, research has shown that personality often has its influence on creativity through proximal mediators like positive affect and behavioral strategies that facilitate creative idea production (Shalley, Zhou & Oldham, 2004). Proactive Vitality Management Our starting point is that creative ideas demand considerable energetic, affective, and cognitive resources because creativity requires flexible thinking and persistence (Nijstad et al., 2010). Loosely connected ideas and impressions can only lead to a creative solution if individuals have sufficient psychological resources to flexibly switch between options and to persist till the solution has been found. Indeed, previous research has provided ample evidence for the contention that cognitive, affective, and energetic resources are important for creativity (Baas, De Dreu & Nijstad, 2008; Hennessey & Amabile, 2010; Ning, Wu, Runco, & Pina, 2015). For example, De Dreu and his colleagues have provided convincing evidence for the contention that cognitive resources like attention and concentration are crucial for creativity (De Dreu, Nijstad, Baas, Wolsink, & Roskes, 2012). The authors assessed working memory capacity (WMC) by asking participants to engage in several trials of a delayed serial recognition task. The persons who scored higher on WMC turned out to perform better on a creative insight task. In contrast, participants whose WMC was taxed showed reduced creative performance. These findings were replicated in another study among semiprofessional cellists who were asked to improvise on three music themes (De Dreu et al., 2012; Study 3). 4
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw