Do you feel like being proactive today? Trait-proactivity moderates affective causes and consequences of proactive behavior.

Proactive people take initiative when others do not and persist in improving their environment or themselves. Although scholars assume that how we feel influences how proactive we are, there is no experimental research yet to support this. This experiment therefore tests whether positive and negative affect influence proactive behavior and additionally investigates whether engaging in proactivity also has affective consequences.

Dual cognitive pathways to voice quality: Frequent voicers improvise, infrequent voicers elaborate.

We investigate the involvement of Working Memory Capacity (WMC, the cognitive resource necessary for controlled elaborate thinking) in voice behavior (speaking up with suggestions, problems, and opinions to change the organization). While scholars assume voice requires elaborate thinking, some empirical evidence suggests voice might be more automatic. To explain this discrepancy, we distinguish between voice quantity (frequency of voice) and voice quality (novelty and value of voiced information) and propose that WMC is important for voice quality, but less for voice quantity.

Working memory benefits creative insight, musical improvisation, and original ideation through maintained task-focused attention.

Anecdotes from creative eminences suggest that executive control plays an important role in creativity, but scientific evidence is sparse. Invoking the Dual Pathway to Creativity Model, the authors hypothesize that working memory capacity (WMC) relates to creative performance because it enables persistent, focused, and systematic combining of elements and possibilities (persistence). Study 1 indeed showed that under cognitive load, participants performed worse on a creative insight task.