This study investigated the antecedents of proactive vitality management (PVM), a behavioral strategy employees use to enhance their physical and psychological energy to adapt optimally to daily work tasks, at both between-person and within-person levels. Based on Job Demands-Resources and self-regulation theories, we present a multi-layered model that tests personal-level predispositions (proactive personality) alongside daily affective states (positive affect), workload, and strain to determine which employees, and under what daily conditions, are most likely to engage in PVM. We also test whether a gain spiral exists between positive affect and PVM across days.
Our research involved 204 employees who completed daily questionnaires over 12 consecutive working days (N = 2,171 daily observations). To reflect the multilevel structure of the data, we used multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) to test our hypotheses.
The results partially supported our hypotheses. At the employee level, while proactive personality did not directly predict PVM, it had a significant indirect effect. This path emerged only when positive affect was included as a mediator, underscoring the vital role of employees' well-being in linking proactive personality to specific behavioral strategies. Furthermore, we found a positive relationship between positive affect and PVM at both levels. The data did not support the hypotheses postulating a positive gain spiral between positive affect and PVM across days.
This study extends the PVM literature by integrating trait-level and daily processes and highlighting positive affect as an affective mechanism linking proactive personality to the daily enactment of proactive vitality management. In doing so, it provides a more fine-grained understanding of how stable proactive dispositions are associated with day-to-day energy management behaviors.
