96 Chapter 4 DISCUSSION In this paper, we argued that employees might proactively manage their own vitality to reach creativity. We followed a heterogeneous sample of employees during five weeks, and asked them to report their weekly frequency of proactive vitality management, as well as their weekly levels of work engagement and creativity. The results showed that participants experienced more work engagement and indirectly improved their creative performance in the weeks they proactively managed their own positive affect, energy, and concentration (i.e., vitality). Employees high in learning goal orientation profited most from this process, whereas employees high in performance avoidance goal orientation profited least. In what follows, we will discuss the most important contributions of this study. Contributions to Theory A first important contribution of the present study is that it shows that proactively managing vitality is an important predictor of creativity, through work engagement – on a weekly basis. When employees proactively choose to engage in activities during or after work that offer them energy, positive affect, or inspiration, they have more resources available to dedicate to their work. These resources fuel the work engagement that can then be used to improve creative performance. Our findings expand the proactivity and work engagement literatures by showing the relevance of a proximal predictor of creativity – proactive vitality management. Whereas most scholars have focused on more distal environmental and personality factors as predictors of creativity (Anderson et al., 2014; Feist, 1998; Ma, 2009), we show that employees can take personal initiatives to be creative. Research in which the proactive vitality management construct was validated (masked, in press) has suggested that people may engage in a range of activities in order to increase their resources, including having lunch outside the office for a change of scenery, engaging in sports activities before work to get energized, and listening to preferential music genres to become relaxed or focused. Although earlier research has shown that energy, positive affect, and focus relate positively to creativity (Baas et al., 2008; Hennessey & Amabile, 2010; Ning et al., 2015), most scholars have overlooked the possibility that employees may proactively mobilize such volatile resources to be creative. Whereas most previous proactivity research has investigated self-initiated, future oriented, and change-oriented behavior
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