Affective events and proactivity

Previous research has mainly focused on how positive activated affective states such as work engagement, enthusiasm, and vigour can promote proactive behaviour at work. By combining the theoretical approaches of affective events theory (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996) and motivation for proactive behaviour (Parker, Bindl, and Strauss, 2010), we broaden this perspective, and discuss additional mechanisms on how affective events can be linked to proactive behaviour via several affective states. In the following, we first provide a short overview of affective events theory before reviewing previous research linking affective events to proactive behaviour. Based on this review, we develop novel ideas on how affective events can foster proactive behaviour, which provide a starting point for future research in this field.