131 Creating A Creative State of Mind (i.e., spanning multiple days). In addition, we asked supervisors to rate their employees’ creative work performance to increase the relative objectivity of the ratings. Using supervisor ratings is a common practice in creativity research in work settings, even though there can be pitfalls to this method as well. Supervisors are only able to report on visible manifestations of creativity, while creativity may not always be visible to others because the creative process involves many internal psychological processes as well. Overall, our approach has enabled a detailed examination and replication of our findings, which show a relatively robust, daily pattern in which proactive vitality management is related to creative performance through states of mindfulness. However, our research is not without limitations. First, we cannot infer causality from our findings, as doing so would warrant the experimental manipulation of proactive vitality management. In the present research, we were interested in processes and experiences that take place naturally and simultaneously, on the same day. Accordingly, the findings indicate that daily fluctuations in proactive vitality management are indirectly related to daily fluctuations in creative outcomes, linked together via daily fluctuations in mindfulness. In addition, scholars have argued that there is good reason to assume causation in the mindfulness-creativity link (cf. Lebuda et al., 2016). Nevertheless, future research may aim to implement an intervention encouraging working individuals to engage in proactive vitality management and examine its effects on (daily) states of mindfulness and creative performance. For example, an intervention focused on awareness and instruction may involve a workshop in which participants in the experimental group learn about their well-being in relation to work, and about how they can proactively improve this from day to day. During the training, participants may set personal goals and come up with various initiatives they can take to be physically active and get involved in interesting activities with the aim to feel energized and motivated. Another limitation is the sole focus onmindful attention and awareness as a mechanism in the link between proactive vitality management and creativity, without examining the influence of other cognitive states (e.g., mind wandering). Moreover, mindfulness was measured using the MAAS (Brown & Ryan, 2003), which has sometimes yielded inconsistent findings in previous creativity studies. However, previous studies involved different research designs than ours (e.g., of cross-sectional nature), while the MAAS 5
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