Proactive yet reflective? Materializing proactive personality into creativity through job reflective learning and activated positive affective states
研究主动性人格如何通过工作反思性学习（从成功和失败中学习）和激活的积极情感状态（愉悦和专注）间接影响员工创造力，基于两项多波次多来源实地研究。
Abstract Studies linking proactive personality to creativity have primarily taken a future‐oriented perspective, describing a process where individuals assess future opportunities and risks of creative endeavors. Complementing this approach, we draw on an attribution theory perspective to delineate how proactive personality relates to employee creativity through the serial mediating effects of job reflective learning—a backward‐looking cognitive process—and activated positive affective states. Job reflective learning captures backward‐looking self‐assessments and the underlying internal causal attributions, and it is differentiated into two valences: job reflective learning from successes and from failures. Based on two separate multi‐wave, multi‐source field studies, our findings consistently show a serial mediation process linking proactive personality to creativity through both valences of job reflective learning and activated positive affective states. Job reflective learning from successes breeds joviality, whereas job reflective learning from failures arouses attentiveness. Joviality and attentiveness—both types of activated positive affective states—in turn promote creativity. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of how proactive employees manifest their proactivity trait into actual creativity through backward‐looking cognitive and affective processes.