80 Chapter 4 In addition, research has shown that affective and energetic resources are important for creativity (Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, & Staw, 2005; Kark & Carmeli, 2009). Amabile and her colleagues used a daily event sampling method to investigate more than 200 employees working in one of 27 project teams for which creativity was a possible and desirable outcome (e.g., developing new products, solving complex client problems). Participants completed an average of 52 daily questionnaires. The findings showed that self-reported positive affect and coders’ ratings of positive affect in participants’ daily narratives were predictive of coders’ identifications of spontaneously reported creative thought and problem solving in the narratives. The central proposition in the present study is that individuals can proactively manage their own, volatile energetic, affective, and cognitive resources in order to improve their own well-being and performance (masked, in press). Proactivity has more generally been defined as “self-initiated and future-oriented action that aims to change and improve the situation or oneself” (Parker et al., 2006; p. 636). We define proactive vitality management as a specific form of proactive behavior aimed at oneself by improving one’s own physical and psychological state. Building on Parker, Bindl, and Strauss (2010), we argue that proactive vitality management fits well within the elaborate framework of proactive motivation provided by these authors. More specifically, whereas proactive goal generation and striving refer to more general proactive goaldriven processes, proactive vitality management may be seen as a specific form of proactivity that may indeed fall under the proactive goal generation process, and more specifically under the umbrella of proactive person-environment fit behavior (Bindl & Parker, 2010; Parker & Collins, 2010). Namely, proactive vitality management has a clear goal (being able to function at work and achieve work-related goals), and people strive to achieve this goal by engaging in self-initiated strategies to manage their physical and mental energy. When using proactive vitality management, people are not changing the work environment, but rather they are changing (aspects of) themselves to achieve a different future (cf. Parker et al., 2010). Due to the proactive nature of proactive vitality management, it is expected that individuals engage in this behavior when they think they can perform the behavior that is needed (“can do motivation”), have a reason to behave in a proactive way (“reason to motivation), and feel they have the resources to engage in the behavior (“energized to motivation”; Parker et al., 2010).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw