Conclusions and future directions

Abstract

The collection of chapters in this book is aimed to offer comprehensive reviews on studies of emotion and proactivity, disseminate new thinking to advance the understanding of the emotional process of proactivity, and provide suggestions for future research. There is a consensus that emotion and proactivity is a topic that should be further studied by all authors of this book, which is elaborated in Chapter 1 (Peng, Li, and Bindl), especially based on the quantitative review of the literature. All our authors have collectively indicated research avenues for exploration with several in consents. Grounding on these, this chapter provides an integrative review of all the chapters and outlines the agreed future research avenues from this edited book.

The chapters in this book have collectively extended our understanding of the subject on emotion and proactivity. To offer an overview of how all the chapters have extended the understanding of the subject, we use Figure 13.1 to indicate the links between work across chapters. As indicated, in almost all chapters, the ‘energized to’ process or the energy perspective proposed by Parker, Bindl, and Strauss (2010) is the seminal and influential work to understand the role of emotion in proactivity research. In brief, they propose that emotion, positive emotion in particular, will bring energy to employees to initiate and foster their actions to make changes at work. We used the dash-line triangle in the figure to represent their work.