Feeling energized to become proactive: A systematic literature review of the affect-proactivity link

Abstract

There is “the affective revolution in organizational behaviour” (Barsade, Brief, and Spataro 2003, p 3) occuring early this century, which transforms the earlier belief by managers that emotions are barriers to rationality at work (for example, Barsade and Gibson, 2007). It is well-accepted that employees’ behaviour at work, including proactive behaviour, is shaped by both ‘cold’ cognitive motivational processes as well as ‘hot’ affective motivational processes (Mitchell and Daniels, 2003). However, proactivity research to date has mainly focused on the ‘cold’ side (Parker, Bindl, and Strauss, 2010), and recently more attention is called to draw to the ‘hot’ side (for example, Cai et al, 2019; Cangiano, Bindl, and Parker, 2016). The increasing importance and interest in the ‘hot’ side affect1 and proactivity link at work is reflected in the descriptive statistics offered by the Web of Science database (shown in Figure 1.1 and 1.2) in the past 30 years with its highest citation frequency captured in 2019. In this chapter we review the role of affective experiences – particularly, (core) affect/mood and (discrete) emotions – in shaping proactivity (detailed definitions are summarized in Table 1.1), generally defined as self-initiated action to bring about change in oneself, team, and/or the organization (Grant and Ashford, 2008).

In proactivity literature, Parker, Bindl, and Strauss (2010) identified three motivational processes that can promote proactive behaviours: ‘can do,’ ‘reason to,’ and ‘energized to’, where ‘can do’ and ‘reason to’ map onto the aforementioned ‘cold’ cognitive motivational pathways (Mitchell and Daniels, 2003), whereas ‘energized to’ captures the influence of ‘hot’ affective processes on proactivity.